Laura Tait spent years working inside Auckland’s fashion circuit, photographing runway shows and designer collections before trading that pace for the slower rhythm of Puhoi, a small village north of the city whose name means “slow water” in Māori. Alongside her partner, she took on an aging farmhouse with a barn on a sloping hillside, and what began as a few raised beds for tomatoes and zucchini grew into a full cutting garden built with tubers, cuttings and advice from other growers over several seasons. She has continued photographing designer collections as a freelancer even as the garden took over, so the fashion instinct never fully left the work.
Working with a macro lens changed how she approached the garden she had built, revealing the texture of a petal, the fray of stamens and gradients of colour that are easy to miss at normal distance. She draws an explicit line between this work and Dutch still-life painting, favouring dense, layered arrangements that read as studies in abundance and imperfection rather than tidy bouquets. Nearly everything she photographs is grown on the property itself, from roses to Icelandic poppies and ranunculus, so each composition begins months earlier as a planting decision rather than a purchase.
Her photographs track the compressed lifespan of a cut bloom, and she has spoken about how closely tending the garden has sharpened her sense of how fast a season moves. That awareness gives the work its recurring tension between opulence and impermanence, light catching a petal at its fullest point just before it starts to fold. She describes the photographs as a collaboration between the garden and the person behind the camera, with authenticity to the flower’s real state treated as central to the process rather than an afterthought.
More info: Website, Instagram.
