Architectural photographer Simon Devitt has published several wonderfully striking books over the past quarter-century; his latest, Cape to Bluff, serves as “a survey of residential architecture from Aotearoa New Zealand”.
Shot over a 10-year period, the beautiful tome – which again sees him team up with writer Andrea Stevens and graphic designer Luke Scott – captures Aotearoa’s eclectic landscapes from top to toe, and some of the most beautiful homes that adorn it. “Although the idea for Cape to Bluff is mine, we are each a stakeholder in this publication,” the photographer tells Verve. “It is important to me that I collaborate with people that are not only amazing at what they do but are fun to work with too!”
What first attracted you to photographing buildings?
“I’m drawn to the places we inhabit and the things we do with those places. Where we live, where we work, where we play. It’s never lost on me that a lot of these homes that I photograph are the result of a lot of hard work by the architect and the homeowner and is often the result of someone’s dream coming true.”
Simon says that architects often tell him that he’s probably seen more architecture than most architects have.
“My eyes don’t necessarily appreciate the technical detail, spot the mistakes, or see the architecture that could have been or the architecture that is, the way an architect would,” he adds. “As a photographer I see other things. I’m not married to the idea that the design works. I turn up for the first time to witness layers of beauty, atmosphere and moments. I see how the architecture serves its inhabitants, the landscape, and the community it occupies, in real time.”
He records these “ingredients” as a “series of moments”, his goal to capture “the spirit of place”.
“And so, it’s with fresh eyes, I arrive early and leave late, and there’s a bit of making it up as I go – it’s that in the moment creativity that excites me. I’ve been to hundreds of other shots before this one, but never this one!”
How do you approach capturing the essence a house?
“A sunset is already beautiful. And so, therein lies the trap. How do you honour this beauty without merely describing it with your camera? My practice involves sitting still and seizing a glimpse of subtle gestures, moments and brief encounters which represent how it feels to be there. I want to hear it; I want to expose its heartbeat. I want to strip the image of the artificial. This is perhaps where my approach departs from what is conventionally expected. I always spend time being still in the environment. I wait to hear its breath. I listen as much as I watch. This is how I find what is really in the space, by letting myself be led by its mystery.”
The spaces in between, he adds, are just as important, “in the same way we understand music because of the silence between each note”.
How were the houses chosen?
“Each house in this book is carefully chosen to allow the reader a view of our beautiful country, a view you may never get to see or experience. The strength of this engrained in the relationship between architecture and photography; the buildings cannot travel but the photography and the stories they tell can. The landscape alone cannot provide the full picture. It is when people, the manmade and the landscape that holds them combine that a wider truth is revealed. These brilliant architects creating context for the aspiration we thrive on. High reward architecture in a brave new world.
“Māori call it tūrangawaewae: a place to stand, where a person feels strong and at home.”
Simon believes the most powerful pictures have tension, a feeling that something has either happened, or is about to “so that you’re compelled to turn the page or look at the next picture”.
“The house,” he says, “isn’t finished until the photographer has been.”
