Saturday, October 20, 2012
ROBERT Logan came to Gisborne with a wife, three kids and a dream.
This week that dream entered a new era with the launch of an on-line archive believed to be the largest digitisation project ever undertaken by a regional New Zealand community.
Initiated by Gisborne District Council district librarian Pene Walsh and driven by H.B. Williams Memorial Library staff, the project makes possible an online search for any of the tens of thousands of people who featured in Mr Logan’s Gisborne Photo News magazine (1954-1975).
It captured a unique slice of Gisborne’s social history, Ms Walsh told about 200 people at the launch at Lawson Field Theatre.
“Bob Logan said he had wanted to create ‘a fascinating record of life in Gisborne’ and that is exactly what he did,” she said.
“Now, thanks to the generosity of the Logan family, we will always have access to the stories in this amazing resource.”
An amateur photographer and owner of a small community newspaper in the Rangiora nearly 60 years ago, Mr Logan saw opportunity in the offset printing process that, by the early 1950s, was commercially accessible.
It made printing photographs easier so, instead of printing “news”, he thought he would print “photos” — or rather, “photo news”.
He moved to Gisborne, rigged up a darkroom in his small Aberdeen Road home and in 1954 the Photo News magazine that would document local social life for the next 21 years was born.
His eldest son John Logan — who eventually took over the business — recalled how, in the early days, printing plates were rotated in an old, cut-down corrugated iron water tank, powered by a motor Bob Logan had pinched from wife Lorraine’s (Lal’s) sewing machine.
At its height, Logan Publishing was printing Photo News editions for nine regions around New Zealand — a total of 60,000 copies a month, nearly three-quarters of a million every year.
Former employee Richard Ralph believes that, with all the magazines that had to be flown around the country, the company must have been one of national airline NAC’s biggest freight customers.
“It wasn’t just a nine-to-five job,” recalls Mr Ralph, who worked for Logan’s from 1962 until 1969.
“You went in and stayed until the job was done . . . and that was fine because Bob was such a hell of a good guy to work for. It was like a family.”
Find it on-line at photonews.org.nz/gisborne