Several decades after his untimely death, the intensely private and solitary architectural photographer Duncan Winder (1919-1970) has not escaped the attention of scholars.
Since July, Sebastian Clarke, a lead advisor at Manatū Taonga Ministry for Culture and Heritage by day, has been putting in a turn as curator for an elegant exhibition of the work of Winder – an architect turned photographer – that is on at the Adam Art Gallery until 22 September (perfectly timed to coincide with the return of the Aotearoa Festival of Architecture from 16-29 September).
Duncan Winder – architectural photographs follows on from the architectural history thesis on Winder’s place as a photographer that Clarke produced at Te Herenga Waka’s Architecture faculty in 2020. A grandson of renowned architect Allan Wild, Clarke’s earlier studies included history and town planning at the University of Auckland, spurred on by a love of libraries and the timely topic of how we accommodate heritage into our thinking about our built and lived environment, while retaining the permissive and creative spirit of modernism.
As Clarke puts it, his day-to-day work is about “expanding our thinking to the relationship we have with the past”, and in that sense his work on Winder is highly connected to some of the current, debates occurring about the lives of our buildings – particularly when arguments about what can be protected and preserved become narrowly one-dimensional.
There is after all a valid line of thinking that cities do happen by happen-chance, and that not everything can be protected and preserved ad interregnum. This is where the time capsule nature of photography enters the picture in a helpful way.
Norman Henry Duncan Winder was born in Prescot near Liverpool in September 1919. He was a 35-year-old practising architect when he migrated to New Zealand, resettling in Wellington where he worked alongside architects like Michael Fowler and Daryl Cockburn at the firm Gray Young Morton and Calder before eventually shifting into architectural photography in the 1960s.
There are no portrait photos of Winder. No firsthand writings about his approach to photography nor his motivation for pursuing the medium have ever surfaced. He operated as an architectural photographer for less than a decade and yet his collection of digitised photography is the most accessible of its kind in New Zealand.
The nearest we have to understanding the man behind the lens is research done by architectural historian Peter Wood that centres on a meticulous piecing together of a biographical iconography from the interior of a room in Winder’s house at Fernhill Terrace, Wadestown (still standing). Wood calls the room “an unconventional self-portrait”.
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From an Adam Art Gallery talk he gave in August, it transpires that Wood’s motivation for researching Winder stemmed from a fascination with the allegorical elements of Winder’s photos of Porirua’s State house suburban streets – where the stalks of power poles assume a crucifix-like prominence.
“Winder made careful readings of the world… Technically and compositionally he was an intelligent photographer,” said Wood. In a tour de force of his favourite Winder photographs, Wood spoke to the companionship they create for him to different chronologies.
Quoting an obituary of Winder written in 1970 by architect Perry Martin Hill, Wood agreed that Winder’s character was that of “the kind of man who, in their time, would have been happy amongst the anonymous craftsmen of the medieval churches”.
In what has to remain a guessing game Wood speculated that Winder had met New Zealanders in the Middle East during active service in WWII and had liked them. His own father had served in the Great War. Clarke’s thesis research looked at Winder’s Last Will & Testament for clues, finding only that he left his home and much of its contents to the interwar Moral Re-Armament movement, formerly known as the Oxford Group, and his car to the Catholic Sisters of Mercy Wellington.
Wood, always a captivating speaker, has landed on a view that Winder’s interior photographs carry a hidden strand of story-telling by their conscious arrangement of furniture and belongings into discernible tableaux, with examples where “chairs are characters”. A form of homage as well, potentially, of famous paintings – like Van Gogh’s ‘The Bedroom’.
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Clarke’s curation of Winder’s work at the Adam Art Gallery extends to hero-ing a photo that features Winder’s shadow, six featured photos and 18 displayed in glass vitrine cabinets, arranged in six ‘chapters’.
Many of the photos have captured architectural subjects in their original state and often prior to their major alteration, or demolition and erasure. Winder’s image of the Wairoa Centennial Library complete with a now “disappeared” mural by E. Mervyn Taylor is provided as an example.
Winder was active at a time that Clarke describes as one of significant architectural activity in Wellington and across Aotearoa New Zealand. Clarke writes that the architect in Winder lives on through the large segment of his archive that is specific to the fabrication and construction of buildings, the inherently brutal, the intrinsically tectonic.
It was the decade when Allan Wild’s Jellicoe Towers (1968) on The Terrace emerged, holding up a vertical finger of modernism to the bump-ugly carpet of Pōneke’s horizontal jumble below. It was also a time when Winder turned his camera to multiple images of the Wellington motorway in development.
Clarke notes this was a period of “healthy regionalism among post-war architectural photographers”, going on to say that “urban centres all had their own local photographers and the need to commission photographers from other parts of the country was uncommon”.
It was an era for instance of the Auckland-based photographers Rod Harvey, Barry McKay and Bill Sparrow, who had a background in advertising. Contemporary European émigré photographers to Winder included Frank Hofmann (Czech Republic) and Irene Koppel (Germany).
Winder is perhaps at his strongest and most successful in the experiential, New Photography scope he gives to interior scenes. Clarke praises the “spatial generosity (and) cool objectivity” Winder affords this aspect of his work. He attributes Winder’s excellence in this regard to the advantage of a “trained architectural eye”.
A representative shot singled out by Clarke for its tonal variance in particular, shows the foyer of H H York Ltd, Pito One, as seen from the landing of an internal staircase – one of many taken in the industrial and commercial snugness of the Hutt Valley.
Winder’s depiction of the domestic interiors of modern houses, including the Alington House in Karori, is a stand out. A few bring to mind the twentieth century visual acoustics of American Julius Shulman, with the eye candy pictorials of floor to ceiling windows captured at night-time and from mid-distance.
This exhibition will hold interest for the likes of the Te Pūtahi Centre for Architecture Ōtautahi Christchurch given the inclusion of photographs chosen by Clarke from a visit Winder made to Canterbury in November 1965. On this visit he focused on a diverse range of subjects including the strong geometry of buildings by Miles Warren and Maurice Mahoney and of both Lincoln College and Canterbury University. Applying as always a sharp, unencumbered, keenly objective and calm, deliberately sober and measured eye.
Along with shots of interior spaces, photographs of educational spaces are prominent in Winder’s portfolio.
Academic campuses presented Winder with bespoke and organic environments of multiple buildings situated in close proximity to one another. Clarke observes that by dint of their “arrangements and typologies” these environments offer a photographer a striking array of “architectural and visual contrasts” compared, say, to the often staid and cramped patterns set within our block-shaped suburban and urban forms.
As noted by Clarke it is fitting too that this exhibition is taking place within a location that Winder knew from experiences such as his time as a working architect assigned to the design of the Easterfield building. He returned often to the campus to record other building projects and to make the most of photographing buildings like the Rankine Browne library building.
Clarke observes that Winder managed to both accentuate the library building’s “monumentality” while also taking advantage of its vantage points through to shafts of cityscape, still visible and mostly recognisable today.
Attention is drawn by Clarke’s selections too of Winder’s ‘Quiet Earth’ take on Wellington’s inner-city streets, their oblique angles from set-back perspectives serving to achieve an “eerie” timelessness.
Exhibition attendees are lastly rewarded with a sample from the additional cache of 200+ Winder photographs that consist of close-ups he took of architectural models.
Miniatures that recall the power such Lilliputian dioramas permit to a photographer, to be seen from every angle in order to communicate a myriad of architectural possibilities for public consumption.
Note: Duncan Winder: architectural photographs has been realised through the generous support of the late architect Bill and his wife Margaret Alington, ONZM, who made a significant gift to Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery in 2023 to support projects that will advance architectural knowledge. Bill Alington (1929-2024) died earlier this year – you can read an article about his life at nzia.co.nz or watch this month’s City Talk about Bill by architectural historian Dr Michael Dudding here.
