CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Do Something New, New Zealand”
Caroline McCaw & Megan Brasell-Jones
Considering New Zealand’s Language of Landscape Imaging
To introduce our chapter, we would first like to introduce ourselves. We are Caroline McCaw and Megan Brasell-Jones, design educators at Otago Polytechnic within the Communication Design degree. We are both Pākehā New Zealanders, who have primarily learned about design through New Zealand education systems and through magazines, books, films and online resources. Among other things, we have taught the somewhat fraught history of design to students who are more interested in doing design than writing about it. Published histories of design notoriously draw upon examples from Europe and more recently the United States. Over the last ten years working through this canon, we have attempted to weave New Zealand histories and themes into courses in order to help contextualise the ideas, values and concepts of Aotearoa New Zealand for our learners. This chapter begins by drawing upon a conference paper first presented to design educators in Europe in 20151 in which Caroline McCaw examined the history of landscape images brought from Britain in the nineteenth century and reproduced in the processes of settler colonisation in early New Zealand. We expand on this by considering the role that contemporary designers have played in reproducing those images both within and outside of tourist narratives. We reveal the political lens of the coloniser and the shadow it has cast in the ways we present ourselves and our landscapes through marketing strategies incorporating graphic design and photography. We then reflect on critical challenges to these traditional depictions of New Zealand landscapes employed in contemporary graphic design. New Zealand – once remote, distant and living under the colonial shadow of Europe – is changing, and we argue that the way designers visualise our landscapes needs to change too. We identify contemporary design examples of old and new narratives, and examine “Do Something New, New Zealand”
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