Tom Hutchins

Tom Hutchins was a pioneer of New Zealand photography and a champion of the medium, helping to establish courses in photography at the Elam School of Fine Arts in the 1960s. Hutchins was also an early member of PhotoForum, an organisation ‘dedicated to the promotion of photography as a means of communication and expression’, but his work as a photojournalist went back to the 1940s. In 1956, he became one of the first non-Communist Western photographers to document life in the People’s Republic of China during its brief period of openness amid Cold War tensions. In four months, he covered east China from Canton (now Guanzhou), and Shanghai in the south, to Peking (Beijing), Shenyang, Anshan, and Changchun in the north. He also traveled northwest from Sian (Xi’an) to Wuhan, and across the Gobi Desert to far west Urumchi. Although supported by Life magazine editors and a member of the Black Star agency, Hutchins’ China work remained unpublished after he failed to secure a book deal in the 1960s. Disheartened, he put the China series in storage and moved on to pursue a teaching career. From 1965 to 1980, Hutchins taught film and photography at the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts, establishing the first full-time courses in the British Commonwealth. After his death in 2007, fellow photographer and friend John B. Turner uncovered Hutchins’ long-lost archive, preserving a unique record of revolutionary China. Hutchins’ work continues to shape understandings of both Chinese history and photographic practice.