The Afterglow of Industry: New Zealand Photographs 2012–2022 collects photographs and texts made during a 10-year project in which Chris Corson-Scott repeatedly travelled the length of Aotearoa, from its urban centres to its most remote landscapes. Through painstakingly produced large-format film photographs and accompanying texts, the book explores the aftermath of the industrial era and colonial project in Aotearoa, reflecting on what our labour and dreams can mean in an age of late capitalism and climate change.

The publication features 79 photographs and substantial texts on each image written by the artist. It is edited by Francis McWhannell, with editorial support from Christina Barton (who also contributed the foreword) and Nigel Borell (Pirirākau, Ngāi Te Rangi, Ngāti Ranginui, Te Whakatōhea), and is designed by Elliot Ferguson.

It’s rare for an Aotearoa-based artist to be picked up by a New York art book publisher. Can you tell us more about Daylight Books and how your relationship with them originated?

Daylight was founded as a photography magazine in 2003 by photographers Michael Itkoff and Taj Forer, then studying under Joel Sternfeld at Sarah Lawrence College, New York. Since 2011 they’ve been a publisher of photobooks. Instead of prioritising cool design and art world stars, they look for new artists making work about social justice that might connect to audiences beyond the art world. For instance, in 2011 they published then little-known Mexican photographer Alejandro Cartagena’s first book, Suburbia Mexicana; he currently has a retrospective at SFMoMA and a recently published Aperture monograph.

I was introduced to Michael by my late friend Harvey Benge in 2018. I’d had an email dialogue with his tutor Joel, and we found we had similar interests in publishing and photography. He offered to publish my book, and waited seven years for me to finish it.

Can you tell us more about the project’s origins?

I started this project in 2010 with a narrower focus on suburban subjects, and without ‘industry’ as the link. In 2012 I changed from a 4×5″ to an 8×10″ analogue view-camera. With the increase of visual information on negatives four times larger, I found I could make the subject smaller, and let the work breathe more.

The images became more about the subject’s relationship to the wider landscape, and the history and complexities of the land itself.

The new images were better, so I cut the three years of pre-8×10″ work. As I started travelling more around the North Island, I began feeling that industry linked nearly everything I was photographing. It was also overlooked in understanding Aotearoa’s colonisation, and helpful in thinking about sustainability, climate change and late capitalism.

Many of the photographs in the book have also been shown in solo and group exhibitions across Aotearoa. How has the project evolved and transformed over 10 years?

In 2015 I started travelling to Te Waipounamu South Island, and did most of my work there over the next five years. Whether it’s Lord of the Rings or 100% Pure New Zealand tourism, the South Island exists in the global imagination in a way the North Island doesn’t. Complicating that by photographing acid mine drainage, collapsing coal mines, and general colonial and capitalist folly, is fertile ground as one element of my project.

The South Island also has more of the quaint, small-scale and abandoned colonial industrial structures, which became a favourite subject. They were also rapidly being destroyed, whether for ecology restoration, or eco-tourism or simply scrap, so photographing them was urgent. In just a decade, many of the subjects in my book no longer exist.

Audiences may be interested in understanding more of your process. How do you go about planning a trip, or making a particular image, for example?

The South Island work was made on a shoestring with most of the budget going to film, film processing and (guiltily) petrol. I’d take my four-wheel-drive down to Otago or the West Coast from Tāmaki over a few days, staying with friends on the way. Once I was set up in places like Balclutha, Alexandra, Greymouth and Rapahoe, I’d pitch a tent at the cheapest campground I could find. Each day I’d travel to sites within a few hours’ drive of the camp. After a week or two, I’d pack up and move to a more remote DOC or private campsite, and use that as a base to hike into the backcountry sites.

Loading and unloading 8×10″ film holders each night on shared kitchen tables in tents and in the back of cars isn’t ideal, but putting up with that and sleepless nights in tents meant I could afford to be on the road for months at a time to do the work.

I had a lot of approaches to finding subjects. Before trips, I’d spend months studying topographic maps, old mining maps, online archives and history books. In the evenings at the campground, I’d look over the topo maps again, looking more thoroughly at what was nearby. In each small town, I’d trawl the secondhand bookshops and museums, for history and photography books, which I’d go through in the evenings too.

Local knowledge was really important. I met with miners, farmers, archeologists and amateur historians, who would tell me about another person or place to investigate. There were always more places to visit and photograph than I had the time or money to get to. I think I got to most of the important sites, though.

How do you find yourself navigating the contingencies of the often unfamiliar environments you enter, with their unforeseen risks and rewards? Can you speak to the lived experience of your work in the field?

I’ve had my four-wheel-drive stuck overnight on a ridgeline during an unforecast snowstorm on the Denniston Plateau, been chased by a mating sea lion on the Otago Peninsula, and had the cops called on me while photographing subdivisions. I’ve been offered drug-spiked tea in a shack with plastic for walls on top of timber framing, had farmers with shotguns appear behind me on quad bikes, and stumbled onto a recently abandoned outdoor meth lab. I’ve nearly had hypothermia, been lost in snow-storm white-outs, and had camera gear destroyed in torrential rain. It’s all fun, though, at least afterwards.

I guess you were never going to be a desk jockey.

There’s no escape from modern life. I still spend two thirds of my time at a computer working on images, and doing tedious admin like everyone else. But I like photography and filmmaking because they drag me into reality, and connect me to places, people and situations I otherwise wouldn’t encounter.

In this case, it appears that the ‘reality’ is the encounter itself—exploring what it means to photograph and be photographed. This is the first time you’ve written extensively on your own photographs. The book has grown into a major research project, particularly since 2022, when the photographs in the publication conclude. How has the experience of more in-depth historical research and writing shifted your understanding?

I kept hoping that this kind of writing would become easier, but that didn’t really happen. The main challenge was that each text is a self-contained story, and I had to really rummage through Papers Past and endless books and journals to untangle the truth and understand many of the stories.

There are parallels with the collapse of the American Midwest. Can you speak to this further?

Around 2016 I saw the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign as the last chance for the United States to turn away from plutocracy. The rest of the Democrats wouldn’t even acknowledge the inequality, addiction and lack of hope that deindustrialisation had left in its wake in tens of thousands of small towns around the country. It’s like this in most of the world, and as I travelled to each small town in Aotearoa. I saw the same division here too. I thought it was important to make art about.

Daylight Books used to be partly based in North Carolina—which has the same problems as the American Rust Belt—so Michael immediately got what I was doing, and saw the relevance of what was happening here to there.

You’re also increasingly working with other artists. What’s on the horizon?

Last year I joined poetry publisher Compound Press as Editor of art books. It was started by my friend Chris Holdaway in 2011. Our goal is to make art and photography books that should really be museum shows, but haven’t been, for whatever reasons. We also want to help our artists build audiences overseas, so we’re partnering with Daylight to co-publish our photography titles internationally. A 20th anniversary reissue of Derek Henderson’s The Terrible Boredom of Paradise is coming soon, with many new images, and all images remastered.

Also coming is The 1981 Springbok Tour by John Miller (Ngāpuhi, Ngāi Tāwake ki te Tuawhenua, Te Uri Taniwha, Ngāti Rēhia, Te Whiu), one of his most important bodies of work, all in colour, and remastered, but still largely unseen. We’re also working on books by Nova Paul (Te Uriroroi, Te Parawhau, Te Māhurehure ki Whatitiri, Ngāpuhi), Andrew Ross, Arielle Walker (Taranaki, Ngāruahine, Ngāpuhi, Scottish/Irish Pākehā), Mark Adams and more.

What other projects are you working on?

I’ve collaborated with Mark Adams printing his colour work for over a decade, so it was great to work on his retrospective at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki last year, which is about to open at Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū. I’ve just finished two projects with Nova Paul, collaborating on large-format photography and printing for public art commissions at Whangārei Hospital’s new oncology ward, and Mōwai, the student wellness centre at AUT [Auckland University of Technology Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau].

A long-term project is working through digitising and printing the John Miller archive, with new prints on show now at Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery and Te Whare Taonga o Waikato Museum & Gallery. I’m about to go to Ōtautahi Christchurch with cinematographer Darryl Ward to continue work on the Mark Adams documentary I’ve been working on for a few years. I’m also developing photos and a film documenting my four-hectare regenerating bush block in West Auckland that I’m restoring.

Later this year I’m going to expand my industry project in the UK and France and begin a collaboration with anthropologist Nicholas Thomas. If funding materialises, and World War III allows, I’m hoping to make some work in the USA too.

What are your reflections on the International Center of Photography Photobook Fest 2025 in New York?

It was pretty overwhelming to hang out at a table, for a few days, with many of the best publishers, editors and artists in the world. Artist and photographer Mike Mandel had a table across from Daylight, and I bought signed books from him. I also had studio visits and coffee with artists I admire, such as James Welling and Paul Graham. I visited David Leventi upstate, another photographer, who has done all the drum scans of film for Mark Adams and myself for a decade.

It’s just cool how open the art world is in New York. I got to meet foundation directors, photo editors, and photography curators from museums in Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia. I showed them my book, and work by artists we’re publishing, including John Miller, Mark Adams and Fiona Clark. They were amazed by the quality of work in Aotearoa, and I’m looking forward to showing them new books at the end of the year. I think Aotearoa’s photography is about to take off overseas, and it’s been a long time coming.