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There’s no doubt that Brian Brake was New Zealand’s most renowned international photographer, as the Te Papa exhibition publicity announces.

Yet the country that celebrated this was a very different one from today, says Mark Amery.

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“The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there” LP Hartley famously wrote in The Go-Between. You can visit the past, but even with our own I’d suggest we are tourists, collecting images and impressions at a remove.

Hartley’s line rang strongly for me on many different levels thinking about the survey of photojournalist Brian Brake’s 40-year career at Te Papa.

There’s no doubt that Brake was New Zealand’s most renowned international photographer, as the exhibition publicity announces. From his admission into the renowned Magnum agency in 1952, through decades of work jetsetting the globe providing photo-essays for the likes of magazines Life and Paris Match in their heyday (before television and then the internet took command of the way we see the world), Brake had a stellar professional career worthy of full appraisal.
 
Yet the country that celebrated this was a very different one from today. The exhibition’s other marketing tag-line – ‘Brian Brake, our best known photographer’ – no longer holds so true. In terms of what it would say about us it would be somewhat depressing if it did.

For my generation, who grew up in the 70s, our best-known are the likes of Marti Friedlander or Ans Westra. Rather than look abroad, as immigrants looking amongst us they tried to get to grips with what makes us tick. When Brake pointed his camera back at us, it was to please. His photographs reinforce an image of ourselves as a content rural idyll in a picturesque landscape. They now look rather ordinary next to better takes on the same subjects within our visual library.  

Westra and Friedlander are amongst a handful of photographers who have received substantial career surveys elsewhere. Yet Brake is the first to get one at our national museum, and has already had two exhibitions previously there in the 1990s, Monsoon and Brake in China.

What Brake has however is bankability. He was a commercial photographer and the spirit of that is continued here. On entrance the first thing I see is a large framed print and the text ‘Take Home a Brake’, an advertisement for the sale of prints by Te Papa as authorized agents for the Brake estate.

Beyond this is a beautifully curated exhibition by Athol McCredie. The extent and breadth of Brake’s international career makes for fascinating biographically structured walk through documentary. Brake’s story is engagingly told, presented through everything from Brake’s cameras to slideshows of images, and partition screens that, cleverly with the luminosity of Chinese folding screens, feature enlargements of Brake’s proof sheets.

Yet beyond all this, looking at the photographic evidence with fresh eyes, its hard to see why Brake warrants yet again such significant attention. Particularly when it comes in the woeful absence of any exhibitions considering our strong photographic history.

There are many strong images here, yet surprisingly few great ones. Many have graced the exhibition publicity. There they do well what they were originally intended to - grab your attention as you leaf through a magazine. They were not intended for the gallery wall.

Brake was a great craftsman, full of ambition and drive to either stage a great image (his background at the National Film Unit and interest in film sets are an interesting line through the exhibition), or stick in there to get the good shot. His famous image of Picasso at a bullfight appears principally the result of strong craft, pluck and persistence, rather than inspiration.
 
None of this criticism of Brake is at all new. Yet I was surprised by how often I found photographic series’ here as photo journalism underwhelming, or individual images unsatisfying in their connection to their subject or the lack of music in their composition.

The ubiquity of air travel and cameras today makes many of us in our travels play at being Brian Brake, and occasionally getting results. Technically Brake lived in a very different country to our own. One without digital facilities and with shooting speeds far slower than today. The work was far more difficult to accomplish. Yet conversely Brake was accorded the sort of resources to complete his work today’s photographers could only dream of.

Today we have access to images of the world and the past at our fingertips. To earn a framed place on the wall then a photograph really needs to sing, holding its own. Brake understood beautifully the theatre of the camera, focusing in with light on the exchanges between people, objects and landscapes that are considered of value. Yet he rarely does more than celebrate, honour and let things glow.

The photographs live best as they were meant to, bleeding into the magazine page. McCredie serves us well by providing ample opportunity to look over magazine spreads. A standout image in the exhibition is one of the earliest, Brake’s photograph of a swan passing through the still, mist laden mirrored surface of Lake Mapourika. This was Brake’s first work to be published in Life magazine. More atmospheric than the most impressionist paintings could hope to be, it glows softly in perfect symmetrical glory in blue inky tones in a doublepage spread. It doesn’t need to compete with paintings on the wall. Today’s filmmakers with their gargantuan budgets couldn’t have staged something better themselves.

• Lens on the World, Brian Brake, Te Papa, until 8 May 2011