Geothermal study no. 5

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Geothermal study no. 6
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018). Theo Schoon’s photographs of the geothermal region of Rotorua are quite different from the usual spectacular images of the area. Created in the early 1950s while Schoon was living and working at the nearby Waipa State Mill, his photographs avoid the conventional tourist landscape panorama. These works are extreme close-ups, exposing the true wonders of the environment. Art historian Michael Dunn has observed that Schoon ‘brought not the eye of the casual visitor looking for the obvious display of natural forces at Whakarewarewa and Ohinemutu; instead he came with a thorough knowledge of contemporary abstract painting and design’. He had an ‘obsessive purpose — to reach past the trite and commercial to the unique, the magical, the true beauty of these areas’.1
Schoon’s photographs are rigorously modernist. Flattened into two-dimensional designs, the glistening, boiling mud of Geothermal study no. 6 is an organic abstract composition of great beauty. Schoon himself found this ironic. Commenting on the general distaste for abstraction in New Zealand at the time, and the fact that his photographs revealed a kind of natural modern art, he wrote, ‘Here at least they [the public] can’t splutter and waffle: nature is a modern artist.’2
Schoon made the most of the compatibility between his modernism and tourist imagery. In a letter to the artist Gordon Walters he wrote: ‘It is all very amusing. I have something for the top people — and the Woolworth ten cent crowd.’3 It wasn’t long before Schoon’s photographs found their way into tourist publications. The fifth edition of Rangi and Rotorua, a book about Guide Rangi (Rangitīaria Dennan) published in 1963, features a page dedicated to the mud pools of Whakarewarewa in which two of Schoon’s photographs are a visual demonstration of the ‘beauty and symmetry’ of the area’s geothermal activity.4
Damian Skinner 1 Michael Dunn, ‘Theo Schoon: Photographs of the thermal regions’, Art New Zealand, no. 32, Spring 1984, p. 46.
2 Cited in Gerhard Rosenberg, ‘Theo Schoon’, unpublished essay, undated, p. 3A, CA30/1/9, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives.
3 Theo Schoon, letter to Gordon Walters, undated, p. 3, CA44/1/1, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa archives.
4 JH Richards, Rangi and Rotorua, AH & AW Reed, Wellington, 1963, p. 18.

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