5.0 out of 5 based on 1 reviews. – Customer review on 26/10/2007

Scott Freeman won’t be a well-known name to many New Zealanders, even those interested in landscape photography. His photographs have appeared in a number of Craig Potton Publishing calendars and diaries, but otherwise have not been widely published.

Hopefully, the publication of a book celebrating his work will change that, as Freeman’s work deserves much more recognition. Scott Freeman has a gifted vision, and his photographs challenge anyone who would still deny that photography cannot be art.
A friend once said to me that great photography, like great poetry, enables us to view the world in a different light, to grasp an angle of something we’ve not quite observed ourselves. Scott Freeman’s photographs of familiar places do just that. His image of Mitre Peak after a heavy snowfall show this New Zealand icon in a highly original light, refreshing our sense of what can be a clichéd scene.

As Brain Turner writes in the introduction, Freeman is more likely to present us with the fine detail of a scene rather than a sweeping landscape, and the resultant images are intimate, showing fine observation skills and an eye for unconventional beauty.
There are images of limestone boulders embedded amongst dark pebbles, a spindly tree framed by a rushing stream, a cluster of herbs on Campbell Island. Images of an ash-covered slope on Mt Ruapehu, scoured out dunes on Stewart Island’s Mason Bay, scattered driftwood at Cape Foulwind.

Freeman exposes to us the fact that simplicity can be remarkable, a lesson often forgotten in a complex modern world.

Brain Turner, in his extensive essay at the beginning of the book, claims “My words won’t make Freeman’s work better or worse.” Turner underestimates the power of his own words to illuminate some of the motivation for Freeman’s work, and that of other nature photographers. He writes “To me, Freeman is saying that the first requirement, the one from which we must begin, if we are to pay proper respect for the non-human world around us, is to pay close attention to what is there in front of us in so many changing and varied, extraordinary guises and disguises.”

The criticism some art critics may make of photography - that it is static and gives no sense of the dynamic - is proven false by Freeman too. His image of dunes in Te Paki, Northland, has a sense of tension; the rippled arcs of golden sand poised, ready to move at the slightest hint of wind. This is nature photography at its best.

Scott Freeman – New Zealand Photographs is a finely produced photographic book of a highly original artist, and a must for nature lovers or anyone with an interest in landscape photography.

Shaun Barnett