by Susan Knaap

Paul Little is a man in love with life – it oozes from every pore and echoes throughout the growing body of photographic work that has been a major creative focus for three years. How did he stumble upon photography? “I met this rooster on the side of the road and we shared lunch and he told me to do photography… and so I did,” he says, humour duly noted.

The whimsical and the sublime seem to go hand in hand when it comes to Paul’s work – from the fanciful creatures he manufactures courtesy of Photoshop to the pure, unadulterated impressions of nature. With the latter, the sense is that it is ‘nature’ with both a small ‘n’ and a capital ‘N’ – nature as environment and Nature as the eternal creative force that underpins everything. In other words, nature is no longer something we look at, but experience ourselves as.

“It seems to me we humans have become very disconnected and removed from nature – we are no longer part of it,” says Paul. “We live in conceptual realms, ‘thought prisons’ where everything is analysed, judged, assessed and boxed. We no longer see the actual thing; only a mental abstraction. I want to bring the viewer directly into the experience of the image minus the endless judgments; to magically transport them into an actual experience of the interconnectedness of life.”

And transport us he does. The viewer is offered a new perspective of what we typically take for granted – Toi Toi transform into shimmering manes of golden thread; wet sand into a vast sheet of glass mirroring the cloudscape above; bird feathers into intricate tiers of patterned silk. This is not nature as we have come to expect it – rather, a fresh take allowing us to view the world once again through innocent eyes.

A Stage 3 student, Paul is thriving on the challenge of new perspectives and possibilities. “I mainly work with Peter (Adsett) – we do one on one Skype calls each week and it’s just worked out awesomely. I’ve learned so much – ‘thanks Peter’. During this last term I would like to move more into the intuitive, spontaneous and magical; to dance with nature and see what our dance together manifests photographically. And to allow the knowledge base I am being shown to become an intuitive aspect of my photography.”

Not surprisingly, commercial opportunities have already presented themselves. A long-time devotee of wild-life, Paul has given freely of his photography services to the Karori Sanctuary (www.sanctuary.org.nz). His work features on their website as well as on promotional posters, CDs, information boards, media releases, newspapers and pamphlets, some of which are being used by the Interislander, Tranz Scenic and the Department of Conservation – no mean feat given the latter’s already bulging database of photo archives.

Where to from here? Once he completes Stage 3 in July, Paul intends focusing a little more on the business side of art, setting up a small company and perhaps publishing one or two collections of his photographs showcasing New Zealand’s unique natural environment. Other than that, it’ll be business as usual – reading, tramping, diving, kayaking, travelling, dreaming, gardening, taking photos, “messing around on Photoshop”, listening to music, relishing silence when it happens and, last, but not least, drinking home-brew beer and hanging out with his “wild friends”. Sounds like a pretty good life.

If you’re interested in seeing more of Paul’s photography, it will feature in a slide show at TLC’s end of term exhibition (opening night) in mid-June. You can also visit his blog-site at
http://paullittlephotography.freeservers.com/index.html.