Neville Wright house (designed by Vernon Brown) Takapuna, Auckland

Frank Hofmann was an influential photographer, both commercially and artistically, who introduced interwar European modernist ideas and practices to New Zealand. Born in Prague in 1916, Hofmann (who was Jewish) escaped to England after the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia and emigrated to Christchurch in 1940 where he established himself as a freelance photographer.

Hofmann's work explores the camera's capacity to express heightened emotions and a contemporary essence, drawing on techniques that were pivotal to the modern photography movements of the 1920s and 1930s. His images frequently employ ambiguity, a lyrical interplay of line, shape, light and shadow, strange angles, and above all a transformation of the ordinary.

The ‘Neville Wright house’ was commissioned by Auckland couple Neville and Betty Wright in 1942. Situated on the crest of Kitchener Street, Takapuna, the house included many signature features of Vernon Brown’s modernist design, including the use of creosote timber, white window frames, a sloping monopitch roof, and an overall simplicity of form. Brown was a member of Auckland’s Group Architects, a progressive group of academic architects who pioneered a local modernist vernacular.

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