Photobook/NZ Festival Exhibition
As part of the New Zealand Photobook Festival, Craig Potton and I showcased our portfolio box sets — both as an exhibition at Photospace Gallery in Wellington, and at the Photobook/NZ Bookfair at Te Papa. Craig showed his Moment & Memory alongside my Silence — the same portfolios we first exhibited together Nelson the previous year, now up in Wellington for the week of the festival.
PhotoSpace Exhibition
Image: James Gilbert (Gallery Owner) hanging Silence prints at Photospace Gallery
Installing the work at Photospace felt like a revelation. James hung the prints directly on the wall — no glass, no frames, just the photographs themselves pinned clean against white. What I hadn't anticipated was what the space would do. The shadows the prints cast on the wall became part of the work — the lines, the quiet around each image, the breathing room between them. It all amplified the silence the photographs are trying to hold. Seeing them like that, physical and unmediated, made me feel the work differently. Tactile. Genuinely real.
The box sets were on the wall at Photospace Gallery, 1st floor, 37 Courtenay Place, Wellington, from Friday 7 to Saturday 15 August. Craig and I gave a short talk about the work on Sunday 9 August.
Photospace Gallery, Wellington: Friday 7 – Saturday 15 August 2026
Photobook/NZ Bookfair
Craig and I also had a table at the Photobook/NZ Bookfair on Saturday 8 August at Te Papa — a full day alongside photobook makers from around Aotearoa, Australia, the US, Europe, and Asia. Having the box sets out on the table where people could actually handle the prints and spend time with them felt exactly right.
Watching people stop, pick up prints from Silence collection, and work slowly through the prints in the middle of a busy fair was one of those quiet moments you don't forget.
Folio Box Sets
In an era dominated by digital portfolios, the Folio Box Set revives the near-lost art of owning a complete, tactile collection of fine art prints. Pioneered by photographers like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, these sets offer a way to hold a body of work as a curated, collectible whole.
Silence:
Richard Young
My Silence portfolio presents an alternative view of the New Zealand landscape — minimalist photographs that invite the viewer to listen, letting the silence speak in the space between objects and the voids surrounding them.
View: Silence Collection
