In 1979 Lucien Rizos set out to photographically document New Zealand. Working in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Rizos toured the country, carrying his camera and making images of the people and culture that he encountered along the way. Rizos’s photographs evoke a place and time that is both familiar and strange, a vision of New Zealand that remains captivating over three decades later.

The period 1979 to 1983 has always been a favourite period in my photographic life.

"These photographs come from a very specific time in New Zealand history. The New Zealand I lived through then may feel like a different planet to a younger generation now, people who did not live through the Muldoon era and the trauma of Rogernomics. But there are themes that bind the different periods together. Even though New Zealand may look very different, I feel it is still fundamentally the same place that it was when I was taking these photographs." Lucien Rizos