If 
we start with a picture of the photographer at work — a simple, straightforward shot without any artist-as-subject conceit — then we’re looking at a scene from a time past, Victorian or Edwardian maybe, where photography was painstaking and deliberate but also something rather magical. Photography, you could say, as slowly developed truth. We see the camera — a 120mm medium-format Hasselblad — mounted on a tripod and we see the photographer, New Zealand portraitist Jane Ussher, winding on to the next shot, perhaps the 300,000th she’s taken in a 30-year career.

For almost all this time, Ussher has worked at the New Zealand Listener. Ask her when she started and she demonstrates an artist’s disregard for dates: it was possibly in 1977, probably in 1978, but certainly no later than 1979. Whatever, Ussher started during the Listener’s golden age where, thanks to a monopoly on television listings, the magazine was a national institution, circulation nearly half a million.

If the Listener had unstated ambitions to being the national magazine of record, then Ussher could lay claim to being New Zealand’s official state photographer. To sit for her was confirmation you were of consequence: she’s shot every Prime Minister — from the “charming and funny” Muldoon to the “incredibly generous Lange”; from the “bright” Bolger (“he has a very good, wry sense of humour”) to the “very clever” Clark. She’s done the icons (Sir Ed, Mr Meads), the actors (Sam Neill, Bruno Lawrence, Russell Crowe) and the activists (Tama Iti, Bruce Jesson); the rockers (Tim Finn, Dave Dobbyn, Graham Brazier), the writers (Emily Perkins, Janet Frame, C.K. Stead) and the poets (Sam Hunt, Hone Tuwhare, Allen Curnow).

And while some stars have fallen, others ascended to heaven, Ussher’s portraits often became the enduring image of the person. Think Jonah and (trampled Poms notwithstanding) you’ll probably picture him with eyebrow arched. Think Colin Meads and there he is, down on the farm, barrel-chested, silver hair spilling over the top of a faded indigo singlet; his gaze — inscrutable — from under bushy brows. 
 
But then you have a photo wholly untypical of its subject that conveys another aspect of their character. The cover of Ussher’s 2004 book Portraits features a 1989 shot of Bruno Lawrence that’s unlike most shots of the late actor: those bassett-hound eyes are closed, the forehead furrowed, his left hand pulling the corners of his mouth down into a tragic Janus mask. Yet the photo is imbued with warmth and calm.

Ask Ussher the secret of this shot — taken, unusually, in a studio — and she’ll attribute it to luck, Lawrence’s genius and, only after much prompting, her own talent. Possessed with considerable reserves of empathy, generosity and mischief, Ussher’s rapport with her subjects gives her photos intimacy. And then there’s her avowedly old-fashioned approach.

Ask Ussher why she does this — why the old-school Box Brownie business has become her modus operandi — and she’ll tell this is the way it’s always been, ever since, as a student at Wellington Polytech, she acquired a friend’s Hasselblad. “I was in a rare position of being a beginner with a camera of this quality. It looks antiquated and clunky and it sits on a tripod… and there’s nothing spontaneous about it at all. You’re hand winding between shots; each roll of film had 12 shots on it then it’s back, off, stop, take it off… put on another roll.

“With a 35mm camera you can shoot very quickly and possibly slightly more haphazardly. It’s on the hoof and in your face. There’s the opportunity to be more lucky… for more happy accidents.”

The Hasselblad — the Swedish box camera that famously documented the Apollo missions — is a different beast altogether. “It’s a entirely different way of looking at things,” Ussher says. “It’s very slow and laborious — pedantic even. I think the Hasselblad formalises things in a way — there’s definitely a camera and a subject — whereas with a 35mm camera it’s quite difficult to know if you’re in the frame or not. You don’t necessarily perceive yourself as the subject.”

And yet, she says, the more formal approach works. “Most people feel self-conscious when they’re being photographed. But because I haven’t got a camera stuck in front of my face that feeling passes. People respond to you rather than think they’re having a photo taken. And that’s what I want — I want them to forget about the camera and forget to pose.””

The results can be remarkable. Like her shots of former NZRFU chairman Ces Blazey. Unfortunately, the Listener hold on to Ussher’s work as covetously as a child with chocolate so we can’t reproduce them here but let me try and give you some sense in words.

1981. The Springbok tour. Barbed wire fences, Red Squad — “move, move, move” — behind shields and batons; protestors in crash helmets assailed by snarling rugbyheads, clattered clowns with broken heads. It’s often said this was the closest New Zealand has come to civil war — this was the tour that divided the country, often divided families. But it could also divide individuals.

Because I can remember, as a 10-year-old, thinking the protests were very exciting and cheering as the improbably-named Marx Jones flour-bombed Eden Park in his Cessna — but then running from the lounge in tears when, in at the end of that third test, Naas Botha lined up the conversion at 22-all.

Ussher didn’t join other Listener photographers with protestors on the frontline — instead she crossed enemy lines and went to photograph the Chairman in his world. There are two shots of Blazey in Portraits. In one, he is photographed in tie and ill-fitting suit at the NZRFU’s Wellington headquarters. He stands in front of an indistinct wall of All Black team photos, his hands awkwardly clasped. He looks like an undertaker.

He looks like a man out of his time. A stubborn fool who’d happily wreck the country just to have another photo on his wall. The old bastard.

And then, on the opposite page, there’s Blazey in front of his house, this time in a casual jacket with a v-neck jumper and very high trousers. He looks 10 years younger — is it even the same man? — and those large hands hold flowers handpicked from his garden. He looks calm, kind, intelligent. A dear old coot. A granddad.

If you ever wanted to capture the ambiguity of that terrible tour in two photographs, you’d choose these.

In June this year, Ussher quit the only real job she has known, starting life, as she puts it, as a photographer “minus the hyphen Listener”. Sitting in the lounge of her open plan Tony Beazley-designed Mt Eden townhouse, the slim 55-year-old seems even more ebullient than usual. Rather untypically “Listener” it has to be said.

I worked at the magazine briefly in 2000–01 and remember labouring under the weight of its history. This was a serious mag — even when it was irreverent, it would be definitively irreverent. I’m sure I recall a staff writer wearing a tweed jacket with leather elbow pads; then editor Finlay Macdonald didn’t smoke a pipe but I think most of his predecessors did.

And then there was Ussher. A couple of times a week she’d glide in wearing black Suzi Quattro stovepipes talking far louder than anyone else, laughing more too, and looking like she was up for a prank. She was different.

And while Listener writers’ bookcases may have been cluttered with Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and the collected works of Proust, Ussher’s coffee table boasts the past two years of Vogue, neatly stacked, ordered by date. A large John Reynolds painting Curve of the Heart and Anatomy of Attrition hangs on one wall; hordes of husband Grant Gallagher’s futuristic/anachronistic sculptures made up of disembowelled typewriters patrol the lounge. A Gordon Crook “Potatohead” painting is by the kitchen, but you won’t find an Ussher print anywhere.

However, if she was to have a photo, it wouldn’t be one of hers. There are a few contenders: an Annie Leibovitz perhaps (not one of the over-the-top Vanity Fair snaps, but a grittier shot from her book about ordinary women). Maybe one of Mary Ellen Mark’s heartrending 1994 pictures of the Damms, the mid-western American family who lived in their car. Or possibly something from former Listener colleague’s Bruce Connew’s portfolio.

“I look at Bruce’s Soweto Single Men’s Working Quarters photos and they are just astonishing. They tell so much. This is poverty. This is oppression. This is injustice. They’re difficult photos to take because they’re easy photos to take and yet he has somehow managed to do it in a way that’s wholly respectful.

“But if I had to choose a photo — just one — it would be something from Anne Noble’s Wanganui River series (1981–82). They’re extremely powerful, simple black and white images. Jerusalem shrouded in mist. But you don’t feel she stumbled across this — you sense she walked in with a vision of how she saw things.” Rather Vincent Ward.

“Now there’s a New Zealand filmmaker I’m completely visually in awe of. I just think every shot of his is a still. The poster for Vigil with the little girl holding the staff with the mountain behind — just perfect.”

I ask her if Ward somehow captured that dark, brooding landscape that has long obsessed angsty Aotearovians. “I steer clear of the word capture because I think there’s a kind of myth about photography — I don’t think if you’re with someone for an hour, a day or a week you really know that person.

“With magazine photography… what you aspire to do is take a photo that’ll draw people in. Grab their attention enough to stop them, make them wonder about that person and then want to read about them. But I would never have the audacity to think I’ve ‘captured’ that person.”

Nor, she says, would she ever want to. “I believe photographers have a duty to respect their subject — it can’t be all about you. I really, really feel strongly about that… there are whole raft of photographers so hell-bent on being recognised and having a style — they’re forgetting they’re just a conduit. I’m very happy just to be a conduit. The subjects are the star.”

But it’s easy enough to say this when you’re assured of your place in the firmament. Born in Dunedin, the oldest of three kids, Ussher has always backed herself. It helped she came from a supportive and intellectually curious family: her late father John wound up Vice-Principal at Wellington Teacher’s College, mother Judith was a nurse; siblings Richard and Victoria would later become teachers. Says Ussher: “We’re a close family. We’re very fond of each other.”

And so, when just of her teens, she was offered the Listener job, she wasn’t at all fazed. “Right from the outset, I just took photos. I don’t remember being a bundle of nerves. I’m not a fearful person.” Onwards and upwards. Hers would be a charmed life, at least until the accident.

She tells the story very well. She’d been to the Fairy Shop on Ponsonby Rd to buy props for the Listener’s Christmas cover. With fairy wings tucked under her arm she looked right, left, then stepped out.

“The driver told police she’d looked in the rear vision mirror to check something when she hit me. She hit me at 60 km/h — she wasn’t slowing down.

“I remember just thinking ‘Faaark!’ I didn’t black out… I remember lying on the road and being so pissed off. I was screaming with pain — apparently people still remember my screams. Fortunately there was a doctor (!) and I remember thinking I must’ve dislocated my shoulder and this is going to be so embarrassing: I’m going to stand up and this nice doctor is going to do like you see in the rugby — click — and send me on my way. Shiiiit! She’s held up the traffic! So I’m thinking ‘It’s time to get up now, stop making a fuss, stop inconveniencing people. As things got worse, I felt almost pleased. Like I was allowed to make this fuss.”

After being stabilised — and, bizarrely, calling both husband Grant and the Listener to tell them to postpone the afternoon’s shoot — Ussher was rushed to Auckland Hospital. “I arrived in A&E where my best friend Caroline is a nurse. She asked if she could be with me and I could see things were going to hell in a handbag by the expression on her face. That this wasn’t just a dislocated shoulder — that things were really fucking serious. And that’s when it drove home to me that I wasn’t going back to work on Monday.”

She was in hospital for two months, off work for six. After she returned to the Listener I saw her in Ponsonby, not far from where the accident took place and was shocked at how broken she seemed. She was gaunt, bent; she limped along like a little old lady. But the accident seemed to have wounded her in other ways — the bold, vivacious Ussher was gone, replaced by someone timid and fragile. I haven’t seen her since and so when I visited her for this interview I was afraid I’d see a diminished friend.

Happily, I can report she’s the same old Jane. “Of course, I wish it hadn’t happened,” she tells me. “But I used the time off really productively. Nicholas (her son, now 20) and I had been going through a really rough patch and it gave us time to sort out our relationship. This is the thing with the Listener — I let it completely dominate my life. My relationship with Nick suffered.”

The time off also allowed her to think of a working life beyond the magazine. Now in just her third week freelancing, she’s due at the Starship Children’s Hospital in an hour to take some photos of Sally, a 19-year-old fighting cancer. “For the Listener,” she says, smiling. “We did Starship’s room two a year ago for the cover. It’s a follow up.

“But I’m hoping this’ll be the first of a series of portraits of Sally. I see this as a 20–30 year project. I hope I’m going to be there when she gets married; when she’s pregnant … when she’s got grandchildren.”

Then next week she’s off to the Desert Road with her old Listener mate Steve Braunias. It’s the first of a series — “Passersby” — the two are doing for North & South magazine. “It’s an opportunity I couldn’t possibly have turned down. I rate Steve so highly as a writer. I was also really touched that North & South went — ‘Hey, not four, not six, let’s give them eight pages’ — and we’ll trust them to devise their own brief. Which is that we go somewhere in New Zealand and just do our own thing.

“I’m really interested in photographing our visual history — I don’t mean particularly photogenic stuff either. I’m interested in the stuff you don’t miss until it’s gone. I want people to come to me and say ‘This is disappearing. Can you spent a month of your life here and photograph it before it disappears?’

“I’m looking forward to arriving somewhere and then, for two or three days, just soaking it in. When you’re driving through — unless something extraordinary happens — it becomes a bit of a blur. But if you stop even in the most ordinary little place and you’re there long enough, you start seeing things. That’s what I want to start doing again. Stop long enough to start seeing things again.”

First published in Sunday magazine in 2008.