Brian Brake: Lens on the World

Brian Brake (1927-1988) was New Zealand’s best-known and most successful photographer. His career spanned the golden age of photojournalism and with his camera he roamed the globe. Alongside legends like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ernst Haas, Brake was a member of the photo agency Magnum. His work was published internationally in magazines like Life, Paris Match and National Geographic.He is remembered today for his rare photographs of communist China in the 1950s, photo essays such as Monsoon (1961), his travel work, and his iconic images of people such as Pablo Picasso and Chairman Mao Zedong, Robert Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth and Alfred Hitchcock. In New Zealand, books of his work like New Zealand, Gift of the Sea (1963 and 1990) were publishing phenomena, while his haunting photographs of taonga Maori are still widely known from popular books like Maori Art: The Photography of Brian Brake (2003) and Te M ori: Te Hokinga Mai (The Return Home) (1986). Yet Brake’s vast body of work has never been seen, or critically considered, in its entirety until now. What were his formative influences? How did he work? What was his significance in his own time - and what is it in a lasting sense? This book - and the 2010 Te Papa exhibition of the same name - will reveal at last the full sweep of Brake’s life and work, through more than 300 superb photographic reproductions and six, all-new essays by recognised writers on photography, giving readers unprecedented insights into Brake, the man, and how he saw the world.