Exhibitions Wellington

DESMOND KELLY

Paul Hewson is a young man of thirty, born in Feilding, now living and working in Auckland. He works as a postman to leave himself time for photography and this exhibition is drawn from a number of projects continuing over the last few years.

Most come from a series called Almost From a Buick Six. The Muldoons are from The Prima Donna Prime Minister, and others from various recent events.

PAUL HEWSON
Almost from a Buick 6 series
photograph

What binds them together (in Paul Hewson's words) is 'a sense of unease'. Unease with what? He belongs to the first generation in our history not to know real economic hardship. For his age group, if there has not been enough money for wants, there has always been sufficient for needs: and it has been an article of faith with us that when there was enough for all, we should be approaching Utopia.

Yet Paul Hewson is disquieted by what he sees. In tune with Bob Dylan (from whose words he devised the title of the series Almost From a Buick Six) he is not convinced that more money has made a better place. An example of this is his road series. The road is not the observation platform - it is itself under scrutiny and not as an engineering feat of communications but as an extension of man's presence across the country-side. His camera makes us take note of what normally we see but are not conscious of; and the depth-of-field of his wide-angle lens imposes near objects, sharply, on the vastness of sky in a way that our eyes do not. It does indeed leave a sense of unease when we see what we surround our roads with: the selfconsciously majestic war memorials of small towns, the gables of house and factory and the clutter of street furniture - the petrol pumps, signs, posts, lettering and wires, wires, wires. . . These things, so familiar to us, have a confining value when seen like this. One picture in Queensland, shows gum trees dotted against the sky with tall curved road lighting poles looking for all the world like long dinosaur necks, heads poised as if to graze on the trees. It would be a very ordinary scene on the spot: but in photographic tones and depiction it has a powerful sense of impending obsolescence. Somehow our values - our abilities to live within the limits of nature - are questioned.

PAUL HEWSON
Almost from a Buick 6 series
photograph

Paul Hewson's work throws much light upon the man. A considerable sense of humour is shown in the wry titles of his polaroid series: The effects of 25 years in the same job on a 42-year-old-man; The effects of an unbalanced spaghetti diet on a non-Italian man etc. His humour couples easily with his prejudices and he flinches from neither. Clearly not a worshipper of the Prime Minister, he uses the awkwardness of that man's body language to leave us with a feeling of discomfort about our trust in Mr. Muldoon's political reliability. The polaroids and the road pictures emphasise a freedom of approach, yet underline the care with which it is done. At no time is the fact that pictures are shot from moving vehicles or hand-held in low light offered as an excuse for poor workmanship. They are simply the conditions under which he sees his pictures, and the prints realize that vision, beautifully and powerfully.

Perhaps the core of Paul Hewson's work lies in his considerable power to concentrate his observations and his feelings into his pictures. It is disarmingly strong and particularly pertinent to our times. In his notes with the show he says about his unease: 'But whether this is apparent to anyone else, I don't know. And I suppose it's not really important'. With that kind of independence it is no wonder his work is not only good, but original and penetrating.