“They were into their music so we had loads of records lying around and I was always intrigued by the characters on the music covers,” he recalls, foreshadowing his own proficiency for evoking character through portraiture.
At the age of about nine, Spid had been promoted to chief family photographer of the house, and by 13 he decided that photography was what he wanted to do with his life. After leaving school at 15, he became an apprentice to an electrician, the money from which he quickly invested in a Minolta X-300 35mm film camera with 50mm lens.
His self-taught photography journey eventually led him to London and art school before he returned home and won a Ronald Woolf Memorial Trust grant to study photography and graphic design at Auckland’s AUT in the 90s. From there it was into full-time assisting gigs, one with fashion photographer Melanie Bridge, and another with still life photographer Mark Lever, before going freelance in 1997.
In the ensuing decades, Spid rose to the top of the commercial ranks, honing a practice of creating imagery that radiates character and spontaneity, while holding tight to important detail and subtleties. These instances of what he calls “life’s theatre” have been sought after by diverse brands such as Singapore Airlines, Coke, Nokia, McDonalds, Jockey, Dave Dobbyn, Auckland City Council, Huggies, Watties, Genesis, and more. Over that time his accolades have included wins at the Lürzer’s Archive, International Photography Awards, Communication Arts Photography Competition, Effie Awards, Campaign Brief’s The Work and NZ Marketing Awards, among others.
Although the images of The Fleeting and the Abiding do not instantly resemble the quirky, humorous portraits that have become his signature, close attention shows the photographer’s ability to invoke character – even in the absence of a human subject – very much persists in this personal work. These images present the verbal tics of geography, the idiosyncratic facial features of the flora. The land is many things to many people, and it is clear that for Spid, it is as much a cast of characters as it is a stage itself.
