Nick Shepard: GMT+13

Nick Shepard: GMT+13 by Daniel GeorgeMay 6, 2025

©Nick Shepard, Greenhouse

For the next few days we will be looking at the work of artists who I met with at this year’s Society for Photographic Education conference during the portfolio reviews. Up next, we have GMT+13 by Nick Shepard.

Nick Shepard’s work ranges from photography to installation and sculpture. Regardless of medium, he explores the construction and consumption of images, objects, and spaces. He is based in Sacramento, where he is an Associate Professor of Photography at Sacramento State University and an active member of Axis Gallery. Shepard’s work has appeared at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, the Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Wassaic Project, Disjecta Contemporary Art Center, Holland Project, and Site: Brooklyn. His 2022 exhibition, “PUSH / PULL” at TGTG in Sacramento was celebrated as “poetry in architecture.”He received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and his BA in Studio Art and Art History from Carleton College in Minnesota.

Follow Nick on Instagram: @nickeshep

©Nick Shepard, Ponga Silver Fern

GMT+13

Aotearoa (“Land of the Long White Cloud” in te reo Māori) New Zealand is known for its “green” reputation and striking landscapes, especially those that have been set aside as National Parks. Those landscapes have been made famous by The Lord of the Rings and many other projects that have been filmed there.

The pictures in GMT+13 highlight the ways in which the land has been shaped by years of human intervention. First Māori (maw-ree) and then English settlers have transformed the islands. Where there were once native Kauri forests there are now scenic pasturelands devoted the country’s famous sheep and cows.

Despite its progressive political reputation, Aotearoa New Zealand has been wrestling the effects of a narrowly-elected right-wing government rapidly enacting sweeping changes on topics ranging from the environment to Māori rights. This is not simply the primordial land of common imagination.

For many of us, photography is just a way to escape to another place via our phones, or to nostalgically look back on a trip we took. The images in this project use digital manipulation to interrupt purely casual viewing, and to call attention to the constructed nature of my pictures and of the scenes I depict.

Far from a comprehensive view of Aotearoa New Zealand, GMT+13 demonstrates my struggle to make sense of the thousands of images I created, and more generally, of a place that feels so familiar and so unfamiliar all at once.

©Nick Shepard, Currents, Ōtākaro River Avon Currents, Ōtākaro River Avon Cu

Daniel George: To start things off, what motivated you to spend time in Aotearoa New Zealand and create GMT+13?

Nick Shepard: I first visited in 2005 on a studio art study abroad program. My professor, Fred Hagstrom, was an amazing guide, encouraging us to investigate the place, people, and culture. In many ways NZ felt very familiar, but that program invited me to think comparatively about how it differed from the US, and I’ve often returned to that question. I’ve been lucky to visit again in the intervening years, and those questions have resonated even more strongly. When I was planning a sabbatical from Sacramento State University, I was interested in dedicating more time to explore those questions that have stuck with me for about twenty years.

©Nick Shepard, Northwestern Motorway, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

DG: Would you share more about the subject matter of your photographs? What prompted you to focus your attention on these specific places and examples of flora?

NS: I had been struck by the ways in which New Zealand has been able to meaningfully acknowledge and seek to repair the role Maōri play in the country while California and the larger US have been unable to do so. There are a number of NZ artists who have explored Maōri culture and history directly, and I was thinking about how to symbolically represent ideas of nativeness, colonization, and repair from an outside perspective. In 2023 or so I was making composite images of plants and other scenes, so I thought about using native, invasive, and introduced plants as a way of getting at those ideas.

That’s a fine initial model, but it’s quite reductive. Of course, any ecosystem or culture is incredibly complex, and consists of old and introduced elements. Maōri arrived about a thousand years ago, bringing canoes, culture, and language. They adapted to a cooler climate than they experienced elsewhere in Polynesia. They and European settlers brought rats with them, which have been a severe threat to native birds like the kiwi. So I wanted to be sure to capture images that celebrate specifically NZ places and things, like the ponga silver fern. I also pulled in elements that spoke to other modern NZ scenes, like manicured lawns, sheep grazing in fields, or motorways.

I even found that invasive introduced species were not so simple: gorse is a highly aggressive plant that was introduced by settlers from the UK as hedge plant. It’s a very common weed, similar to Scotch broom—if you see it, you try to pull it out by its roots, otherwise it will continue to grow. So: invasive species, bad. But there’s a twist: it turns out that in parts of New Zealand gorse is actually a really good companion plant when folks are working to reseed native trees, which then eventually take over. So you have an introduced, invasive plant serving as the support to reestablish native forests.

©Nick Shepard, Aro Valley

DG: You have adopted both subtle and overt uses of digital manipulation in these images. Would you talk more about these mediations and how you feel they speak to human intervention within these landscapes?

NS: There are two main kinds of digital manipulation going on in the project: panoramas and overlays. The panoramas build on the so-called “Brenizer Method” to create greater areas of shallow focus than the lens can naturally create. The overlays colorize shifts between multiple exposures of a scene. In both cases the images sample a longer section of time than expected at first glance. I use these techniques to call attention to the constructed nature of the image, of the scene itself, and to a certain extent, to the idea of the neutral landscape photograph.

There’s been lots of chatter about photo manipulation since the dawn of the medium, and yet we are largely quite credulous in our image scrolling. I want my pictures to be arresting, using digital elements to pull in viewers, but I also use them to draw attention to a feeling of artificiality that signals that my pictures are not just what they seem to be.

In a sense, the digital elements point viewers to read the structure of the picture, and if the picture suggests it should be read this way, perhaps the structure of the subject is something that can be similarly read. The aesthetic elements visible in some of my pictures are meant to point to the elements that have created the scenes I depict.

Pastureland, Te Ika-a-Māui North Island is a panorama, and the irregular border and rough edge visible in the bottom right act signify that the image is a composite. The image portrays the typical NZ scene of grazing sheep in a picturesque pasture. Scenes like this are so common there and romanticized (at least here in the States), that you could think that this is the native landscape. But of course it is a highly manipulated landscape. This hill was most likely native forest before being cleared for human uses.

For an example of an overlay, my picture Ellerslie, Elderslie, Ellerslie shimmers with layers of time that are represented by differently colored elements, and these shimmers allude to the shifts that have occurred in that place, or the multiple meanings that are embedded within the land. That picture depicts a park in a part of Auckland called Ellerslie. Ellerslie was originally going to be named Elderslie after a place in Scotland, but thanks to a clerical error, the name was changed to Ellerslie. Adding to the layers, the image features a stand of native tī kōuka cabbage trees alongside the typical british lawn. A modern Aotearoa New Zealand scene that is a mix of old and new, native and introduced, intention and accident.

©Nick Shepard, Predator Free Wellington, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington

DG: Regarding your creative process in general, you often incorporate sculptural works and utilize site-specific installation methods. In the case of this project, you simply varied print size (which persuades viewers to consider their spatial relationship with the imagery as they move further and closer away). What attracts you to this sort of dimensional viewing experience?

NS: We probably see thousands of photos every day, the vast majority of which are on screens. Anyone reading this is only going to be seeing these pictures as small glossy pixels scrolling down their screen at the same size as any other picture on their screen. So whenever I have the opportunity to show work in a space I really want to value the opportunity to highlight the physicality of the photograph, and to find subtle ways to remind my viewers of their body and of the fact that they are looking at an object in space. So for the GMT+13 exhibit last summer, which came together very quickly and didn’t afford me the chance to really create major physical interventions, I really relied on using scale and surface. Some images were quite small, only about ten inches high, which really pulls visitors into the wall. Then adjacent images could be quite large (44×54) to feel monumental and push folks back to take in the full image. Those pictures, though, are also quite detailed, and I hope that the images then invite folks to step up close again. It’s a quiet way to invite active viewing in a world full of passively consuming pictures.

©Nick Shepard, Exhibition view, GMT+13, July 2024, Axis Gallery, Sacramento

DG: The statement on your work mentions that a component of this project centers on your efforts to make sense of “of a place that feels so familiar and so unfamiliar all at once.” Would you elaborate on this?

NS: I think of New Zealand almost as a mirror image of my adopted home of California. Both places have this outdoorsy culture, where folks enjoy the ability to get from the city out to a bush walk very quickly. In either case you can dip your toes in the ocean and be up in the mountains later that morning. They are renowned for their produce and food. Both are idealized as a progressive paradises. White explorers and settlers mostly arrived in the 18th century, and used missionaries to make inroads with the indigenous populations, before formalizing Anglophone governments in the mid 19th century.

These things have all struck me when I’ve visited. On the other hand, I’m struck by clear differences: I mean, talk about the mirror image, Kiwis literally drive on the opposite side of the road. That’s just one example of how British the place feels. All this while having flora and fauna that are quite different than anywhere else in the world. Plus, New Zealand is strong in its promotion of its indigenous Maōri heritage—Te Reo Maōri (the language) is taught throughout the country, cities and places are now known by both Maōri and English names: it is most commonly known Aotearoa New Zealand.

So part of my interest in making work there was to explore those things that felt familiar and unfamiliar, and to make pictures that also feel familiar and unfamiliar.