Art matters: Romantic has big plans for Kingsize studio

Adam Custins shoots using Polaroid. Photo / Nick Atkinson

In the early 90s, a promising photographer travelled to California to study at the Brooks Institute, a prestigious and specialised college that has made a name over the past 70 years for giving its students uniquely tailored instruction. A few years later that photographer, Adam Custins, set up a studio in Grey Lynn that many local photographers and creative types will know simply as Kingsize. Today the building hums with four studios and a photography and film rental business. An industrious team of eight swells to many times that number when big shoots are taking place. The action sometimes spills out on to the footpath and some lucky pedestrians might be treated to impromptu jazz concerts as musicians wait their turn between set-ups.

"When I opened Kingsize I wanted to create a sense of community, a home for photographers," says Custins.

"In the late 90s there were only movie studios or movie studio rental houses. The whole rental market was new to NZ."

Though this business of renting high-end photographic gear may sound prosaic, Custins is at heart a romantic and adventurous man who'll happily sleep atop an ice-clad mountain in the faint hope he might capture a moon shadow on film.

One of his chief motivations opening Kingsize was to support his fine art photography without having to be continually bogged down with commercial work.

"I'm trying to create something special, just like painting. Fine art photography has been getting stronger and stronger, but we haven't turned that mainstream corner."

Custins has been exhibiting his photographs since his early days, but it was a new development in film manufacturing five years ago that refocused his work.

"Everything that's happened before I started shooting Polaroid has just been developmental.

"I really like the simplicity of it. What I've tried to do is remove as much as possible between myself and the subject. There's simply the light, the camera and a little sheet of Polaroid. It's very similar to drawing... from your mind, to your eye, to your hand. It suits the kind of things I'm trying to say. It was only made possible in 2010 because a company decided to manufacture the film again. They're called The Impossible Project and they make Polaroid film for several formats and a range of cameras. I was able to shoot with one of their first test packs. It was so rare and precious. It all came together. This is my instrument."

In 2013 Kingsize turned another corner opening a unique scholarship programme inspired by Custins' time at the Brooks Institute. "They get three months hands-on experience in a real-world setting.

"These are the studios. These are the people you'll work with. These are the problems you'll encounter," says Custins who screens about 80 applicants for the 20 scholarship places.

This summer they'll run a summer school open to fee-paying general public. It's all part of Custins' master plan to build a world-class school for photography and film-making here in Auckland.