Exhibitions Auckland

TOM HUTCHINS

Photography: Three Exhibitions, Four Occasions

Auckland was the focus of four overlapping occasions to view a range of photography in three exhibitions: Brian Brake: 40 Photographs at the Auckland City Art Gallery; Campus Arts North Photography at the Little Theatre, Auckland University; and Family and Friends at Snaps Gallery.

The total event allows some interesting comparisons - from New Zealand's most publicly known photographer, Brian Brake, to young expressive photographers showing for the first time.

CHRIS HIGNETT
No. 5
processed photograph
(Snaps Gallery)

Of the seven in the Campus Arts North show (Rhondda Bosworth, Gillian Chaplin, Tom Fraser, Chris Hignett, Anne Noble, Peter Peryer, Rod Wills) Chris' Hignett's large, graphic, tonally simplified prints challenge most the mainstream 'straight' image appearance. His prints have a tonality that is 'degraded' by usual standards: they have undergone photocopy processes which add an overall streakiness so that large areas become black, grey and off-white with few if any intermediate tones. To my mind this technique made the most impact in his No.5 - a large monolithic female head and shoulders against the merest suggestion of waves, the face simplified by its blurring movement to little more than eye cavities and a gross mouth that may be uplifted to utter some sound of joy or pain. The shoulders are sharp and substantial: but the person dissolves into some primal face at the moment of the camera's impact - and we don't know if it's an exaltation or assault.

This and other of Hignett's set acquire a gravelly visual texture at some stage before final printing. The technique is used here in a beginning but promising exploration, with the photographer still working out its truly graphic possibilities.

A more assured if highly intuitive approach gives us the four flash-at-night colour prints by Gillian Chaplin, which turn apparently mundane scenes - the steps in Albert Park, tulips in a traffic island, two parked cars - into elegant and charming pleasures of the night.

Assurance of another kind pervades the Brian Brake show - that of a professional and technically highly-skilled photographer backed by the considerable resources of big institutions of the golden years of photojournalism. This personally-selected retrospective covers the years 1951 to 1975, and I believe the earliest image itself embodies a quality too persistent in many of his succeeding. In Lake Maourika, New Zealand 1951, a swan glides gracefully into a mist-shadowed lake: but if we look at the long highlight of the bird's wake on the still water, we see it has been knifed into the surface of the paper, an old pictorialist knack. And I find that a pictorialist concern for the picturesque and exotic characterises many of these prints. It is as if the photographer is an observer of, rarely a participant in, the events. The exoticism and formal beauty of the images can't diminish a sense of emotional distance from the subjects.

BRUCE FOSTER
Anji in the bath
polaroid photograph

Photographers make images, but deal in experience. Their prints are a currency by which we transact the values of their experience. Most of the prints by Brian Brake let us see admirably what he sees - but not enough, it seems to me, what he really feels. They work wonderfully on the visual level and our eyes are mostly delighted, but there are absences on the level of feelings, and our hearts have searchings left unmet. Among the fine exceptions in the thirty-four or so large colour prints is Winter-Hokkaido where there has been an immediate and direct transmission of feeling for a bleak work-a-day landscape. In the half-dozen black/white prints the same immediacy and freshness is in the classic image of Mao Tse Tung. Here the photographer has tilted the camera to ensure that the delicate radiation of bare branches of a tree becomes the top element of the picture, at the expense of the feet. But the strongly striding man on wide dark shapes of his legs becomes an emblem of history as the camera clicks on an image that is so evocative of the politics and atmosphere of Peking of the times.

Images such as the Monsoon girl, the New Zealand farmers, and Milford Sound (here shown in a disappointingly unsharp version) are well-known. But generally I agree with the thought expressed by my colleague John Turner that Brian Brake must have amassed images more personal. Perhaps later occasions will allow the photographer to show images less embedded in the strong institutional context of his career.

Varied personal approaches to Family and Friends came through in the two parts of the Snaps Gallery show. Of the several photographers who used the growing; instant-colour approach of Polaroid, Bruce Foster presented a strange, ambivalent little image of his daughter Anji in a bath. The little girl is floating face up quite motionless - like a doll or corpse - in chill bluish light. But the subdued red of her cheeks and lips swings the response back to life before the blue takes over again, in a constant oscillation heightened by the severe diagonal lie of the body. More ambitious but less successful was the series of three Polaroid prints by Anne Noble suggesting some sado-masochistic interplay between herself and Peter Peryer. The middle print sent the series into melodrama for me with its overdone slashes of red 'blood' on a bare back.

JANET BAYLY
Quamar
photographic print
(Snaps Gallery)

Merilyn Tweedie's two colour Polaroid prints showed parts of unidentifiable people lying on grass like victims of the camera's sharp frame. A feeling of friends and family being made victims, or somehow being taken advantage of - as elements in mini-drama performances of the camera, as design elements in large assemblages, as semi-abstracted nudes - characterised both parts of the show, which tended to use relationships rather than celebrate them. An exception came in two black/white prints by Janet Bayly, especially in Quamar. This apparently simple unpretentious image of a woman who would not conventionally be thought of as beautiful was the strongest humanistic statement in the show, because it was a testament to that respect and affection by which 'ordinary' people are transmuted into another kind of beauty.

It seems to me that every so often we have to come back to intimate, mainstream personal imagery of people from our own world to have our core of values refreshed; and it is fitting that this occurs in a show called Family and Friends, by younger New Zealanders sifting personal experience before our eyes - even if little is definitive at this stage.