I love the way a great photograph tells us a story almost instantly. There is a lot of power in it. When I left school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do so I took a job at a professional developing lab in Hawkes Bay. Here I learnt everything to do with developing negatives and printing, struck up wonderful friendships with the local photographers and took local photography courses. This is really where my passion of the “whole process” came from.
After realising my passion for visual art I moved up to the big smoke, studied Graphic Design and ended up working in Film and Television until my husband and I had our first little person. Then we had a second. Life got crazy for a while there.
We live on the edge of Auckland on a teeny tiny farm. We have plenty of space to stretch our creative itches. We had this dinky little woodshed with a sleep-out attached. I always thought the woodshed was destined for greater things than stacking piles of wood and pinecones. One day a friend told me her friend was a selling up her darkroom equipment and would I be interested in buying it. That was it! That was the missing piece of the jigsaw. The woodshed was already pitch black and the sleep out next door had lots of natural light for a studio office. Over the Christmas holidays my husband lined the walls, put on a door that he had picked up off the side of the road a few years earlier that I had been using for a desk, plumbed it and the kids and I gave it a paint job.
I want people to have access to a space where they can print their work and get the thrill of doing it themselves like I do. I’m also going to explore experimental techniques that I think like minded people will be really interested in.
Studio and Contact Sheet photographs by Alice Veysey of www.paperandpearl.co.nz
