Stunning Photos of New Zealand's Vibrant Scenery and Culture

If your country is as beautiful as New Zealand is, why not show it off? New book New Zealand Photography Collected features 400 breathtaking pictures from the national collection at Te Papa.

Athol McCredie—who has been working as curator at Te Papa since 2001—compiled the photos that he found best captured the spirit of the country. McCredie has spent a lot of time with the collection and has personally added to it, making him the right person for the job. The vast collection of photos is separated into seven chapters focusing on things like portraits, places, and events.

"Like most curators, I had to do a lot of balancing: of picking well-known photographs that people would expect to see, but tempering these with lesser-known images. I would quite liked to have selected entirely unknown images, but I came to realise that we all like to see old favourites, and these tend to be favourites for good reasons," he told Lost at E Minor.

It took about a year for this book to come to fruition: The selection and writing process took about six months, with editing and revising taking an additional six months. McCredie had to sift through roughly 320,000 items when picking the right photos.

"That’s big of course, and makes it one of Te Papa’s largest collections, but in the scale of many museum and library collections, relatively modest. About three-quarters of the items are negatives or transparencies. The collection is very much shaped by the history of the museum. The emphasis of Te Papa’s predecessor, the National Museum, for example, was on ethnology and natural history, and to a lesser extent on social history," he said.

New Zealand Photography Collected comes out November 15, but you can pre-order a copy on Amazon.