John Duke | Ponsonby

“My name’s John Duke. I’m staying in Auckland for two nights in Ponsonby. 

So in the last year, I’ve been mainly living and working in Wellington. I work as a book-seller there at Unity Books, and I occasionally come up to Auckland and do a bit of work in the shop here. I’m currently here in New Zealand on a skills work visa, and in the next year my main goal is to get my residency so that I can stay in New Zealand longer-term.

If I can get my residency in the next year, and that means that I can stay here, I think in the short term, in the next year that’ll mean putting down even more roots, just getting more established in terms of housing in Wellington, potentially you know moving on from the rental situation that I’m in, and then longer-term, yeah it’s about seeing more of New Zealand, having more of a real connection to the country, and using my photography to talk about that more and to communicate my experience of this country to other people.

So in my photography, in the last couple of years especially, I’ve been moving back to film photography from digital, and focusing on the different kind of character that you get from using film, and that’s a really nice way to slow it down and just spend a bit more time thinking before shooting about what I’m looking at, and obviously being in a different country to the one that I grew up in, I’ve got a lot of fresh things for my eyes to see, and I hope that gives me a perspective on New Zealand that’s maybe slightly different to one the locals would have, and to be able to share that is really what excited me about it.

So I’m originally from a town called Lincoln in the UK, which is in the middle of the UK. It’s one of the flattest areas of the country, and I love it there. I love riding my bike, but I wanted to come and live somewhere a bit different, with a different landscape, and it’s a different light. I do a lot of photography, and the light in New Zealand is really appealing to me, and obviously the kind of great outdoors, and just being able to ride my bike on the roads, and in the mountains here is something that I really value.”