Tongariro Power contains a series of accidently erotic portraits extracted from the 1970’s film of the same name by Conon Fraser. This zine celebrates the unashamed machismo of the modernist era. Large scale engineering projects, big rigs and dangerous underground tunneling were the domain of these men within the context of post-colonial New Zealand. The extraction and recontextualising of these portraits opens up voyeuristic hetero and homoerotic subtexts alongside questions of cultural identity and land commodification in Aotearoa New Zealand.

This publication originally accompanied the body of work Tongariro Power, shown as part of the group show Carr, Cowlard, Nunes at Pearce Gallery, Auckland, October 2015.