New Zealand Has the Best-Dressed Livestock

I went to New Zealand to photograph landscapes and came home with an indefensible number of photos of cows. I regret nothing.

Here is the situation. New Zealand has the best-dressed livestock on the planet, and I will not be taking questions. The highland cows alone are worth the airfare — enormous, unbothered, with the exact haircut of a rock guitarist who’s been through some things and come out serene. They look at you like they’ve read your emails and decided to forgive you.

The llamas are running a close second, mostly on attitude. And the sheep — well, there are a lot of sheep in New Zealand, so statistically some of them are going to be photogenic, and they are. I’d be lining up a wide landscape, some genuinely serious composition, and a sheep would wander into frame with better light on it than the mountain.

I don’t have a grand point here. Not every photograph has to be about the raw, untouched majesty of the end of the earth. Sometimes it’s about a cow with a fantastic fringe. The trip that produced the serious South Island guide also produced a small gallery of extremely dignified farm animals, and I think both are allowed to exist.

A few of these may end up as prints, because apparently I now make animal portraits. If a highland cow ends up on a postcard, you’ll know exactly why. Until then — see where I’ve been. It’s mostly mountains. It’s a little bit cows.

— Preston