Tag Archive for: Auckland Portrait Photographer

The Maasai

The Maasai People

Bronze medal for the Maasai at the 2021 North Shore National Salon of Photography – Digital Open category

Cats Forever

Cats Forever

Ilan Wittenberg Photographer

Interview

Devi

Nude Photography Auckland

Nude Photography Auckland

 

 

Devi

Nude Photography Auckland

Devi

Nude Photography Auckland

My name is Devi, I immigrated from Brazil to New Zealand six years ago in 2015. I was born on a small farm in Sao Paulo Brazil, but unfortunately, at the age of 5 my family had to move to the city because of a tragic accident: I lost my left eye!
I was raised in a strict Christian religious family model that helped me adopt good values. These principles include the ideas that women should always be very well behaved and obedient to her husband. The big aspiration was always that I will find a good man to get married and build a family. Nothing wrong with that but it doesn’t work so well for me…
So I got married with my first boyfriend at the age of eighteen years old, virgin, with no experience in life. Consequently this marriage didn’t work out and I divorced my husband at the age of twenty three. I was full of guilt that I had ashamed and disappointed my family and my church community, so I tried to get some support from members of the minister of the church. In one meeting, which was run by men, they didn’t even listen to me and kept saying: “Forgive your partner, he is a good man”. I felt that I had no voice and that I was not supported. Because of this so many women are still in toxic relationships. You simply do not have any support, you just have to be brave and own your decisions independently.
I then decided to leave the church and started to write down my biography. While all these things happened, I never stopped working or studying. I had to work very hard to pay for my own university. I travelled more than two hours every day to work at the bank and at night I went to the university.
When I completed my university studies, I met a nice guy at work in the bank. We fell in love and moved to Costa Rica because of his work. Four months later we were together and this rhymes crazy, right? Haha, I think that Brazilians go too deep and too quickly in feelings of romance, it was an amazing experience for both of us! We were living in a Caribbean country and we were totally in love, but after two years we decided to return back to Brazil because we had more professional opportunities in our own country.
Unfortunately, after four years together our relationship deteriorated. He became a workaholic which brought nice things to our lives: we bought a luxury apartment and built a beautiful life. Everybody could see how amazing we looked together but I started to ask myself if I was living this lifestyle because people said it was nice to have or because I really like it to be like that. I had a nice life and nice work, working in the office paying my bills, what could be wrong? This is traditionally how the books tell us the formula for happiness.
In my case nothing of this really fulfilled me. I decided to immigrate to New Zealand at the age of 30, just so I could accomplish one old dream: to learn English and maybe start a new life. After a while, we broke up. This was the hardest chapter of my life. I felt all these feelings again: disgraced for leaving everything behind me. But today I see I was just trying to discover who I am, what I really like. Because according to my upbringing, I couldn’t be by myself when I was in Brazil. I just hated being a woman because I was ashamed to show my body.
The problems just started. Immigration is never easy, the only money I had I paid it all for a Visa which allowed me to stay in New Zealand. No money, no love, with my heart broken to so many pieces. All alone, I felt so lost with no English, it was the most challenging and important time of my life, I had to keep positive and strong because I didn’t have choices to look back and go back to Brazil, I just tried to grab every good opportunity, to learn, to grow as a person and as a professional. I can tell I started to live again thirteen years later, hahaha. Because I now feel free to fully express myself and not caring about being judged as a woman that left home for all kinds of crazy adventures that you can imagine. It was intense and taught me a lot about who I really am.
When things started to get better I met the future father of my son and I got pregnant unexpectedly. This is another very hard chapter of my life (I feel the tears coming down my face right now). I was sleeping on the floor, sharing a mattress with my Mexican friend Denisse and sharing a flat with more than ten people. I was working as a cleaner in the evening and studying business at night, so I couldn’t stop working because I had to pay for rent and for food, my partner supported me as much as he could but we were in shock and he broke up with me. After this episode I got depressed and I felt very lonely. I just remember staying in this flat. The weekends looked so long, everybody left and I felt so down. I didn’t want to go out but was totally hopeless, still having to clean and to study without any money. What future could I give to my son? But I tried to keep positive.
I had good people around me who supported me and I became calmer. My partner and I got back together when I was eight months pregnant. We decided to live together and to raise a beautiful boy. I now have my own cleaning business and work as a model as well.
In New Zealand I discovered dance which helps me to connect to myself, to express my feelings, to give me confidence and to pose in front of the camera. I just realized that all these bad things happened to me in order to teach me a lesson: you always have to believe in yourself and never give up. Always follow your dreams!
You will probably feel lonely and lost but the beautiful things of life are born through pain. So life has ups and downs, you just have to dance with the flow. For women specifically, accept yourself as you are. Try to live according to your beliefs even if you don’t have any support. Life is too short and too beautiful, don’t hide yourself. I am still learning and discovering who I am, but I have completely changed since the day I left Brazil. I now feel great about being a woman. I am not ashamed to show my body. It is quite freedom and liberating.

Mareah

Nude Photography AucklandNude Photography AucklandNude Photography Auckland

Brooke

Fine Art Photography

Awesome Brittany

Glamour Photography AucklandBallerina Ballet Dancer

Glamour Photography Auckland

Ballerina Ballet Dancer

Glamour Photography Auckland

Ballerina Ballet Dancer

Glamour Photography Auckland

Ballerina Ballet Dancer

Glamour Photography Auckland

Ballerina Ballet Dancer     Glamour Photography Auckland Ballerina Ballet Dancer  Ballerina Ballet Dancer Brittany and the Tin Soldier Glamour Photography Auckland

Lilly

Brooke

Nude Photography Auckland

Beautiful Brittany

Nude Photography Auckland

Beautiful Brooke

Fred and Mark

Hayley

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The Tin Soldier Ballerina

The Steadfast Tin SoldierThe Steadfast Tin Soldier The Steadfast Tin Soldier The Steadfast Tin Soldier The Steadfast Tin Soldier

 

“The Steadfast Tin Soldier” is a literary fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about a tin soldier’s love for a paper ballerina. The tale was first published in October 1838 in the first booklet of Fairy Tales Told for Children. It has since been adapted to various media including ballet and animated film.

On his birthday, a boy receives a set of 25 toy soldiers all cast from one old tin spoon and arrays them on a table top. One soldier stands on a single leg because, as he was the last one cast, there was not enough metal to make him whole. Nearby, the soldier spies a pretty paper ballerina with a spangle on her sash. She, too, is standing on one leg, and the soldier falls in love. That night, a goblin among the toys in the form of a jack-in-the-box, who also loves the ballerina, angrily warns the soldier to take his eyes off her, but the soldier ignores him.

The next day, the soldier falls from a windowsill (presumably the work of the goblin) and lands in the street. Two boys find the soldier, place him in a paper boat, and set him sailing in the gutter. The boat and its passenger wash into a storm drain, where a rat demands the soldier pay a toll.

Sailing on, the boat is washed into a canal, where the tin soldier is swallowed by a fish. When this fish is caught and cut open, the tin soldier finds himself once again on the table top before the ballerina. Inexplicably, the boy throws the tin soldier into the fire, which is most likely the work of the jack-in-the-box goblin. A wind blows the ballerina into the fire with him; she is consumed by it. The maid cleans the fireplace in the morning and finds that the soldier has melted into a little tin heart, along with the ballerina’s spangle, which is now burned black as coal.

Climbing

Auckland Portrait Photographer

Rebecca and John

Portrait Photographer Auckland

Portrait Photographer Auckland

Portrait Photographer Auckland

We Can Do It!

We Can Do It!

We Can Do It!

“We Can Do It!” is an American World War II wartime poster produced by J. Howard Miller in 1943 for Westinghouse Electric as an inspirational image to boost female worker morale.

The poster was little seen during World War II. It was rediscovered in the early 1980s and widely reproduced in many forms, often called “We Can Do It!” but also called “Rosie the Riveter” after the iconic figure of a strong female war production worker. The “We Can Do It!” image was used to promote feminism and other political issues beginning in the 1980s. The image made the cover of the Smithsonian magazine in 1994 and was fashioned into a US first-class mail stamp in 1999. It was incorporated in 2008 into campaign materials for several American politicians, and was reworked by an artist in 2010 to celebrate the first woman becoming prime minister of Australia. The poster is one of the ten most-requested images at the National Archives and Records Administration.

After its rediscovery, observers often assumed that the image was always used as a call to inspire women workers to join the war effort. However, during the war the image was strictly internal to Westinghouse, displayed only during February 1943, and was not for recruitment but to exhort already-hired women to work harder.

J. Howard Miller was an American graphic artist. He painted posters during World War II in support of the war effort, among them the famous “We Can Do It!” poster. In 1942, Miller was hired by Westinghouse Electric’s internal War Production Coordinating Committee, through an advertising agency, to create a series of posters to display to the company’s workers. The intent of the poster project was to raise worker morale, to reduce absenteeism, to direct workers’ questions to management, and to lower the likelihood of labor unrest or a factory strike.

No more than 1,800 copies of the 17-by-22-inch “We Can Do It!” posters were printed. It was not initially seen beyond several Westinghouse factories in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the midwestern U.S. Mostly women were employed in this enterprise, which yielded some 13 million helmet liners over the course of the war. The slogan “We Can Do It!” was probably not interpreted by the factory workers as empowering to women alone; they had been subjected to a series of paternalistic, controlling posters promoting management authority, employee capability and company unity, and the workers would likely have understood the image to mean “Westinghouse Employees Can Do It”, all working together. The upbeat image served as gentle propaganda to boost employee morale and keep production from lagging. The pictured red, white and blue clothing was a subtle call to patriotism, one of the frequent tactics of corporate war production committees.

In subsequent years, the poster was re-appropriated to promote feminism. Feminists saw in the image an embodiment of female empowerment. The “We” was understood to mean “We Women”, uniting all women in a sisterhood fighting against gender inequality. This was very different from the poster’s 1943 use to control employees and to discourage labor unrest. The image is a combination of femininity with the masculine composition and body language.

Rose and Johnny

Nude Photography Auckland

Nude Photography Auckland

Candidate