In 1979 Lucien Rizos set out to record New Zealand. Working in the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, he toured the country carrying his camera and making pictures of the people and the culture he encountered along the way, with the example of Robert Frank's The Americans firmly in mind.

“These come from a very specific time in our history. The New Zealand I lived through then may feel like a different planet to a younger generation now, people who did not live through the Muldoon era and the trauma of Rogernomics. But there are themes that bind the different periods together: even though the country may look very different now, I feel it is still fundamentally the same place that it was when I was taking them.”