Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries:
After serving a purpose for around 120 years, the final pole in St Clair's world-famous poles was felled by Wednesday's southerly storm. The ocean whipped into a frenzy and an icon of the south is now gone forever.
When I started Box of Light someone told me if they ever saw another photo of the poles they'd throw up. So I avoided them for the first few years. Then a photographer mate turned up and shot them and sold a bucket load of prints of them ... and his customers were all Australians.
He taught me that one person's vomit-inducing dislike of them, does not outweigh what an icon they had become. He urged me to shoot them "my way". And so I started around 2013 to make photos of them and they have been some of my most impressive prints with people throughout the world buying them for their walls and a few of those editions close to selling right through.
The biggest destruction of the poles occurred between the winter of 2015 and the autumn of 2016. Some of the once upright poles started to lean and that just sent the growing clutch of dawn photographers into more of a frenzy. Some mornings I counted more than 10 photographers down there and often they were from all over the world. The poles were a social media hit.
That intensified right into 2021 when the poles dropped to 11 and then almost monthly one less with each new swell. And now the icon is but a few stumps that only appear when the sand washes away to reveal them.
This report this week includes some of my favourite previously unpublished shots of ther St Clair Poles. If you want to see even more of my St Clair Poles images then try this link. This one is one of my all-time favourites.
See you at the beach ... Derek
PS The test match between the All Blacks and Ireland this past weekend was the first time in my life I have seen the black jersey look so lost at sea. Well done to the Irish – they're my preferred country to tip the ABs up if anyone has to do it. The Irish outsmarted the All Blacks in so many areas. It felt at times like the All Blacks expected to get a different result from doing the same set moves. It seemed like something was broken inside the machine that has been, for my lifetime anyway, surrounded by magic. Ardie Savea had it. Let's hope he has enough to share, to rebuild that culture and to restore mana back into the fabric of the black jersey.
Box of Light is made possible thanks to these visionaries: