now at lumiere.net.nz
Cool Distance: Goodbye Present, Approaches, Te Atatu Me
MARK AMERY discovers a cachet of emerging New Zealand photographers at Wellington City’s Photospace.
“Te Atatu Me”
LEAF THROUGH the pages of the sumptuous, rather impressive book Contemporary New Zealand Photographers and the pervasiveness of a cool distance between subject and camera is striking.
This is the first published survey of New Zealand art photography in thirty years, and it’s very much a select snapshot of what is considered significant by curators and gallerists today. Few would argue with the significance of the chosen artists only, quite naturally, the absences. In imagery it’s largely a book of eerie vacancies (carefully observed and resonant objects and empty spaces) and beautifully orchestrated stagings.
Human presence is notable for its physical absence in much contemporary photography and when it does appear in younger artists’ work there’s often a reverence for the power of reconstruction, the magic trick. We are far more conscious of the artist’s presence behind the camera.
So far, great, but we still need amongst the new generation of artists those who aren’t afraid of getting more freely involved with the human subject and their own human subjectivity. I marvel at how Edith Amituanai (recently shown at City Gallery) can get so intimate with her domestic subjects and yet at the same time make the casual seem so monumental.
The generational divide is notable between the three most recent exhibitions at photography gallery Photospace: Dan Lucka’s Goodbye Present, Approaches, an exhibition of seven emerging photographers (which gets a second showing next week in Featherston Street), and long-serving photography critic and curator John B Turner’s exhibition Te Atatu Me.
This is Turner’s first solo exhibition since 1985. A photo-essay on his local suburb, it is in a contemporary context rather old-fashioned. And actually rather refreshing for it: a reminder of the liberation and immediacy the camera represents in the artistic eye getting out and about. Te Atatu Me is documentary territory we know well in this country: the photographer as open-eyed outsider, capturing the diversity of a local community through its cultural activities (from gymkhana to the RSA) and working life. There’s also a familiar cautionary statement: treasure those easily overlooked ordinary human quirks that make a suburb special as it changes.
These are unapologetically snapshots, reveling in the freedom with the digital camera to point, shoot and edit. Imperfections in composition and printing occasionally distract (the exhibition could do with a good pruning), but this is made up for by the immediacy and warmth of the photographer’s engagement with his community. Photography is less the brush here and more the tool.
Turner doesn’t pretend to be at a remove from his subject. In fact some of the best of these images present a stand off between subject and photographer: the sleepy suspicious eyes of a milkman in the back of his truck, as if he might push past with his crates at any moment; a little girl with big wary eyes, sitting on the curb, the photographer crouched at her level; an Asian man seen through the window, standing in his empty ice-cream parlour.
At other times Turner, like Peter Black is the street photographer, mixing in as unobserved observer. Here the world in motion freezes, capturing small dramatic incidents that normally slide past us. There’s the comical (a magician’s rabbit sizes us the camera while a girl eats candy floss) and the revealing (a girl looks up questioningly at a war veteran as everywhere around Anzac Day marchers step off in different directions). You sense the photographer entering into the spirit of each occasion. In ‘Veterans, RSA’ the whole image seems to list like a ship as the veterans drown their remembrances in beer.
Turner’s empathy and willingness to get up close and reveal the awkwardness of the space between himself and others are great strengths. It’s the images in this exhibition that are empty of people that are less convincing, the ideas behind them not matched by the strength of their execution.
Goodbye Present is a nice programming contrast; a small suite of photographs by one of the most engaging photographers in Approach, Dan Lucka. While Turner’s images are all about working with what’s before you in the present, Lucka’s exhibition title is a clever play on the way these jewel-like images suggest what remains after the present has just departed.
They are that persuasive contemporary idea of the presence to be found in absence. Yet while the ideas are familiar Lucka’s work has a warm poetic depth, and in their beautiful execution light plays a central role as a central emotive character. A bus stop glows in the dying light like a lantern. The morning light is brightening further up the road far beyond the sign advertising organic eggs from three different type of fowl. We are left standing by the side of the road meditating on a person we have just lost.
The only human figure present in the group exhibition Approaches is a person in a rowboat in Andrew Ivory’s sequential series of images. The boat crosses a body of water in the distance, like some metaphoric apparition.
Approaches has been smartly curated by photographer Andy Palmer as an exploration of the use of landscape in some emerging contemporary art photography. In most of these images the land is a charged lightning rod site for an event that has either just happened or is happening beyond our reach. We are given the after effects of the electricity of the moment and asked to provide our own narrative.
Palmer himself is developing a strong body of work that invites time beyond the present to enter the frame, and here he brings together photographers who while having quite distinct approaches, share his interest in how the photographic image can take us beyond the momentary.
Te Atatu Me, John B.Turner and Goodbye Present, Dan Lucka, Photospace , until 4 November
Approaches: Seven Photographers, 120 Featherston Street, October 24-November 4
“Te Atatu Me”
LEAF THROUGH the pages of the sumptuous, rather impressive book Contemporary New Zealand Photographers and the pervasiveness of a cool distance between subject and camera is striking.
This is the first published survey of New Zealand art photography in thirty years, and it’s very much a select snapshot of what is considered significant by curators and gallerists today. Few would argue with the significance of the chosen artists only, quite naturally, the absences. In imagery it’s largely a book of eerie vacancies (carefully observed and resonant objects and empty spaces) and beautifully orchestrated stagings.
Human presence is notable for its physical absence in much contemporary photography and when it does appear in younger artists’ work there’s often a reverence for the power of reconstruction, the magic trick. We are far more conscious of the artist’s presence behind the camera.
So far, great, but we still need amongst the new generation of artists those who aren’t afraid of getting more freely involved with the human subject and their own human subjectivity. I marvel at how Edith Amituanai (recently shown at City Gallery) can get so intimate with her domestic subjects and yet at the same time make the casual seem so monumental.
The generational divide is notable between the three most recent exhibitions at photography gallery Photospace: Dan Lucka’s Goodbye Present, Approaches, an exhibition of seven emerging photographers (which gets a second showing next week in Featherston Street), and long-serving photography critic and curator John B Turner’s exhibition Te Atatu Me.
This is Turner’s first solo exhibition since 1985. A photo-essay on his local suburb, it is in a contemporary context rather old-fashioned. And actually rather refreshing for it: a reminder of the liberation and immediacy the camera represents in the artistic eye getting out and about. Te Atatu Me is documentary territory we know well in this country: the photographer as open-eyed outsider, capturing the diversity of a local community through its cultural activities (from gymkhana to the RSA) and working life. There’s also a familiar cautionary statement: treasure those easily overlooked ordinary human quirks that make a suburb special as it changes.
These are unapologetically snapshots, reveling in the freedom with the digital camera to point, shoot and edit. Imperfections in composition and printing occasionally distract (the exhibition could do with a good pruning), but this is made up for by the immediacy and warmth of the photographer’s engagement with his community. Photography is less the brush here and more the tool.
Turner doesn’t pretend to be at a remove from his subject. In fact some of the best of these images present a stand off between subject and photographer: the sleepy suspicious eyes of a milkman in the back of his truck, as if he might push past with his crates at any moment; a little girl with big wary eyes, sitting on the curb, the photographer crouched at her level; an Asian man seen through the window, standing in his empty ice-cream parlour.
At other times Turner, like Peter Black is the street photographer, mixing in as unobserved observer. Here the world in motion freezes, capturing small dramatic incidents that normally slide past us. There’s the comical (a magician’s rabbit sizes us the camera while a girl eats candy floss) and the revealing (a girl looks up questioningly at a war veteran as everywhere around Anzac Day marchers step off in different directions). You sense the photographer entering into the spirit of each occasion. In ‘Veterans, RSA’ the whole image seems to list like a ship as the veterans drown their remembrances in beer.
Turner’s empathy and willingness to get up close and reveal the awkwardness of the space between himself and others are great strengths. It’s the images in this exhibition that are empty of people that are less convincing, the ideas behind them not matched by the strength of their execution.
Goodbye Present is a nice programming contrast; a small suite of photographs by one of the most engaging photographers in Approach, Dan Lucka. While Turner’s images are all about working with what’s before you in the present, Lucka’s exhibition title is a clever play on the way these jewel-like images suggest what remains after the present has just departed.
They are that persuasive contemporary idea of the presence to be found in absence. Yet while the ideas are familiar Lucka’s work has a warm poetic depth, and in their beautiful execution light plays a central role as a central emotive character. A bus stop glows in the dying light like a lantern. The morning light is brightening further up the road far beyond the sign advertising organic eggs from three different type of fowl. We are left standing by the side of the road meditating on a person we have just lost.
The only human figure present in the group exhibition Approaches is a person in a rowboat in Andrew Ivory’s sequential series of images. The boat crosses a body of water in the distance, like some metaphoric apparition.
Approaches has been smartly curated by photographer Andy Palmer as an exploration of the use of landscape in some emerging contemporary art photography. In most of these images the land is a charged lightning rod site for an event that has either just happened or is happening beyond our reach. We are given the after effects of the electricity of the moment and asked to provide our own narrative.
Palmer himself is developing a strong body of work that invites time beyond the present to enter the frame, and here he brings together photographers who while having quite distinct approaches, share his interest in how the photographic image can take us beyond the momentary.
Te Atatu Me, John B.Turner and Goodbye Present, Dan Lucka, Photospace , until 4 November
Approaches: Seven Photographers, 120 Featherston Street, October 24-November 4
Mark Amery's visual arts column courtesy of the Dominion Post, Friday October 20, 2006. Lumière will continue to reprint installments of Mark's column on a ongoing basis.
