Draft:New Zealand Seafood poster: Difference between revisions

The poster is sized A2 and contains 80 of New Zealand’s commercial fish species, on a white background. Each of the fish were photographed by Terry Hann. In 2019 Hann stated that he had been attempting to photograph a white warehou for 14 years, but was unsuccessful. In one instance Hann used polystyrene and string to pose the fins and fish of a tail, and used photoshop to remove evidence of this from the poster. He has described photographing fish from trawlers as difficult as the trawling often disfigured the fish. One time when Hann was photographing fish on a boat, a lot of spiky fish became “all puffed up”, which spurred him to don gloves and throw the fish overboard, as he was concerned that they would die. He later discovered that punctures from the spikes were lethal.^[1]

The poster does not include all the commercial New Zealand fish species, but instead the most common ones. Hann has stated that “There’s a lot more that aren’t on there but what I wanted to do was create a poster that had interest, colour and vitality to it and the more fish you put in there, the smaller they get.”^[2]

In January 2021 Hann said that over 20,000 copies of the poster have been sold.^[2]

The original poster design was made in 1977 by the New Zealand Fishing Industry Board. It depicted 28 species, illustrated by the cartoonist Eric Heath. The poster also included ocean waves and a white and green trawler. There were several updates to the poster in the 1970s and 1980s, including the conversion from using illustrations to depict the fish to colour photographs, which were placed on a white background. After six years of photographing fish, the photographer Terry Hann released a new version of the poster in 1994, which depicted 71 species.^[3] In 2018 Māori names were added to the poster, and the fish were resized to correctly show the size differences between them. As of 2021 the poster has not since been updated.^[2]

In 2024 the charity Sustainable Coastlines and creative agency Augusto created a “Trash species of Aotearoa New Zealand” poster. Rather than having species of fish, it depicted 21 common forms of litter in New Zealand.^[4] The names of the litter species combine the type of rubbish and a name of a real fish species. For example there is the “blue pod”, a combination of blue cod and vape pods; “smoki”, a combination of cigarette butts and hoki; and “yellowtin tuna”, a combination of yellowfin tuna and tin cans.^[2]

Hann has created a freshwater fish version of the poster and aimed in 2024 to get it in every school in New Zealand.^[5]