Michael Bajko

The photographs of New Zealand artist Michael Bajko depict the bush as a mysterious terrain in which the ground is vaster than the sky and supple trees move at will. Bajko, who references nineteenth century paintings and photographs of New Zealand rainforests, uses both the clarity and the ambiguity of the photographic image to capture the landscape’s timelessness. In his images, leaves and branches have an almost three-dimensional presence, suggesting a majestic, sensorial openness free from civilization’s influence. But whenever Bajko skews the images, swirling the tree branches or turning the bush into a circular eddy, he reasserts his contemporary voice, implying that imagination and technology simultaneously influence the way people perceive landscape.

Bajko, who is a fourth generation photographer, has a background in theatre as well as art and is attuned to the way images and dramatics influence perception. He is also constantly aware of his own history, especially his settler ancestry. Bajko lives and works in the Waitakere Ranges Heritage Area in the Auckland Region of New Zealand.