Mark Adams

For more than 50 years, New Zealand photographer Mark Adams has explored the relationship between people, places and history through photography. Born in Christchurch in 1949, he has built a body of work documenting Aotearoa New Zealand and the wider Pacific, from landscapes and historic sites to Māori carving and Samoan tattooing. His photographs often begin with a particular place or subject, but look beyond what is immediately visible to consider the histories and cultural connections that shape it.

Adams has worked primarily with large-format analogue cameras since the late 1960s. The process is slow and deliberate: using a large camera means carefully setting up each photograph and considering its composition before taking the picture. Adams has explained that he likes this slower way of working because it makes him think closely about the photographs he is making. The resulting images are highly detailed and carefully composed, often showing familiar places with a sense of stillness.

A recurring part of Adams’s practice is returning to places that have already been photographed or recorded. In Cook’s Sites: Revisiting History, he revisited locations where Captain James Cook and his crew came ashore in the Pacific, including places previously depicted by artists William Hodges and John Webber.

By photographing these locations centuries later, Adams connects the present-day landscape with the images and stories through which it has been remembered. His photographs encourage viewers to think about who recorded these places, and whose perspective has shaped their history.

Adams’s interest in how places are represented also informs his work with Māori and Pacific histories. He has photographed Māori carving, carved meeting houses and sites connected to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, as well as Samoan tatau, a traditional form of tattooing. His long-running work with Samoan tattoo artists, including Su’a Sulu’ape Paulo II, developed through relationships with the people he photographed. These projects reflect his attention not only to the subject itself, but also to the cultural context around it and his own position as a photographer working across cultures.

Adams’s photographs have been exhibited in Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally, and his work is held in major New Zealand art collections. His 2024 publication Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua brings together more than five decades of photography, including landscapes, cultural practices, historic sites and museums. Across these different subjects, Adams continues to use photography to look closely at how places are seen and remembered, and how the past remains part of the world around us.