Mark Adams and Sarah Farrar, Massey University Press, $80
How Tara Viggo fled fast fashion and cut herself a new career.
The photograph of patternmaker Tara Viggo on page 29 was taken by her late friend, UK photographer Caylee Hankins, in 2019. The pair had bonded over their love of surfing and obscure gigs, and spent a glorious 10 days surfing with a bunch of friends in Morocco. “We instantly hit it off,” says Viggo. “She was like a stick of dynamite. She did a lot. After we’d finished a shoot, she’d always be like, ‘Okay, what are we doing next, are we going out?’ She was nonstop and I couldn’t keep up with her.” Hankins died of cancer a year after the shoot, aged just 31.
Unity. Discipline. Endless bobby pins. A story about what draws women to marching—and why they stay.
For 10 years, Tatsiana Chypsanava has been documenting Tūhoe life in Te Urewera, with an intimacy and understanding that comes from feeling like family.
Theophila Pratt, Bateman Books, $39.99
Jessica Hutchings and Jo Smith with Johnson Witehira and Yvonne Taura, Massey University Press, $45
Nine years ago the people of Tāneatua saw that their tamariki were hungry, and bored. The people had no idea how to garden. They made a garden anyway.
Often, kapa haka teams order their piupiu in batches. This year, a newbie team from the East Cape decided to make their own—40 piupiu, all with individual designs—and debut them on the biggest stage in the country. Erica Sinclair photographed the elaborate process.
Olafur Eliasson: Your curious journey highlights over 30 years of world-renowned artist Olafur Eliasson’s creative work. Featuring installations, sculptures and photographs that explore themes of human perception, experimentation, and environmental awareness, it marks the first solo showcase of the Icelandic-Danish artist in Aotearoa New Zealand - and we've got four double passes to give away to New Zealand Geographic readers.
From retirement, David Bimler has embarked on a second career: exposing fraudulent research.
Sixteen years ago, Richard Robinson met a Polish woman, Ania Matuszczak, diving at the Poor Knights. Now, the couple live in Auckland, and have three kids—from left, Nina, Eva and Ted. “For us they’re not just Kiwis,” Robinson says, “they are Polish, and we’re really keen for them to grow up in that culture.” The family try to travel to Poland most years. In 2024, they finally managed to do something they’d always planned: get the kids into Polish schools for a year of full immersion. “They’re doing great, they’re thriving,” Robinson says. “The real highlight is just time with the family… Being Polish, and living in Poland.” He took this photograph in Warsaw, while out for a walk with the kids. Tiny Catholic chapels like the one in the background are all over the city, he says, in private courtyards as well as public spaces. Robinson managed to spend a few months in Warsaw with Ania and the kids, but has been in New Zealand for most of the year, working—and missing them heaps. Shooting the feature about Polish children given a new home in Pahiatua during WWII was a welcome moment of connection. “The joy I saw was in families being together,” he says. During the formalities, the children, now in their 80s and 90s, were clearly delighted to be together. “They almost needed to be shushed like naughty schoolkids.”
Misinformation about the Treaty of Waitangi, its language and its intent is at the centre of the Treaty Principles Bill introduced to Parliament this week.
Switching up the background on your video call might help you stay perky, Singapore researchers have found. The study, published in Frontiers in Psychology, investigated links between the phenomenon known as “videoconferencing fatigue”— exhaustion caused by juggling the real world and the virtual—and the fake backgrounds many of us deploy during work calls to hide clutter, kids or ratty T shirts. (The researchers focused on callers’ own setups, not those of the people they were on with, because—surprise—in video calls, as in life, it’s ourselves we’re most interested in.) Surveying 610 people who work from home, the researchers found that using a video background put an extra processing load on the brain, and wore callers out. So did blurred backgrounds. To avoid fatigue, they recommend static, in-focus backdrops—especially natural scenes. Study co-author Heng Zhang, of Nanyang Technological University, says his go-to is a photograph of Yosemite National Park in the United States—a spot he’s visited, and loved. Zhang says the “warm and peaceful scene... greatly uplifts my spirit during long meetings”. New Zealand Geographic also recommends just taking your laptop to the park.
How building a traditional vaka, and navigating like her ancestors, led Ana Maine home.
The bill is set to green-light projects that clash with local council planning, the government’s future goals, and our international agreements.
Terressa Shandley Kollat’s a star on TikTok—but she’s much more at home in the water.
Michael Belgrave, Massey University Press, $65
Bonsai are teeny-tiny. But for some New Zealanders, they have a way of taking over.
A new experiment suggests the human perception of time is influenced by what we’re looking at. To test this, scientists from George Mason University in the US state of Virginia sorted dozens of images into various categories—a full pantry was “high clutter”, for example, while shots of clouds or empty rooms were “low clutter”. Some images were also categorised as “memorable”—like a close-up of a child laughing. The team flashed the images at participants, asking each to report whether the picture was up for a long or short time, or to hold down a button for the same length of time the image had been up. Over four experiments, the cluttered pictures seemed to zoom past, while the more memorable seemed to linger. Likewise, “larger” images—a stadium, or a pulled-back landscape—dilated the experience of time. One theory presented in the scientists’ paper, published in Nature Human Behaviour, is that this is because our brains are instinctively plotting the body’s movement through space: perhaps a larger image just takes longer to mentally “walk through”. But why would a cluttered picture, like this aerial shot of moviegoers at Auckland’s Silo Park, seem to pass by at warp speed? Perhaps, says one of the authors, cognitive neuroscientist Martin Wiener, this is because our brains simply struggle to process clutter—we skip over it to some degree. (He notes, too, that in the real world these results may differ, depending on what a person is doing and the nature of what they’re looking at.) More importantly: If clutter compresses time, does that mean that your messy co-worker experiences a shorter workday than you, with your immaculate desk? “Ha!” laughs Wiener, “I have no idea.” Stopping to think about it, though, he suggests you would each be accustomed to your respective setups—so each day would feel pretty standard. However: “If you had to work at their desk for a day, then perhaps you’d feel like the day went by quicker—or that you didn’t get enough done.”
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