More Than a Body - What NZIPP Really Means to Me

Just coming up for air after a few crazy weeks behind the scenes, Iris Awards, judging, and conference, as well as Mum to an 18 yr old flying the nest. Once a year the world of New Zealand photography gets loud, and every year I remember why I stay so close to it.

The New Zealand Institute of Professional Photographers (NZIPP) isn't just a professional body to me. It's a community, here and across the ditch in Australia, of genuinely supportive humans who help each other, teach each other, and turn up for each other. We push one another to get better, and somehow still find time to have a lot of fun doing it.

Iris is the heart of that. A year's work, laid out and looked at properly, not scrolled past, but seen. This year I was lucky enough to sit on the other side of the lens as a judge. Hours spent working through print after print with fellow judges, weighing composition, technique and story against a standard I've spent 25+ years trying to meet myself. Judging from the print rather than a screen changes how closely you look, there's a quiet intensity to it, and then the moments where the discussion gets going properly: hands up, cases being made, a bit of friendly disagreement over what makes an image actually work.

Being trusted to sit on that panel and judge the work of my peers is genuinely one of the honours of this career. You feel the emotional charge of it too, a print doesn't just show technique, it asks something of the room. Grateful for the invitation, and for the chance to see so much strong New Zealand photography up close.

Then comes conference. After the intensity of Iris, it's the other half of the year I look forward to, a room full of photographers who never stop learning, swapping what they know, trying new things out loud. Twenty-five years in and I still walk away with a page of notes and a head full of ideas. That's the bit people don't always see: the community keeping each other sharp, year after year.