Exhibitions Auckland

RHONDDA BOSWORTH

Photographs by Janet Bayly

Janet Bayly's photographs often evoke dream-states - the sense of something vaguely remembered that is nostalgic and obsessive. Her stance is the oblique angle, the suggestion rather than the literal statement.

JANET BAYLY
Sunflower, February, 1978
black-and-white photograph
(Snaps Gallery)

Her strongest images have been made with the Diana camera, with its central focus and dark atmospheric quality, and the SX70 Polaroid: both formats being peculiarly suited to a style that is intimate and introspective. The strength of her work lies in its sensitive use of tone and colour, and in its emotional intensity. Of the Diana photographs, most striking was the portrait of Mrs Fennell, a strong and eccentric middle-aged woman in a beautifully printed photograph, rich and soft in colour.

The SX70 medium enhances the intense emotional quality of images that reveal the photographer's reverence for places and objects worked upon by time. In still-lifes like the baby's picture in a frame, the piano keys with sheet music, and in the series of chairs, she presents us with objects imbued with the invisible presence of people.

JANET BAYLY
Christine, Auckland, 1978
black-and-white photograph
(Snaps Gallery)

In the first pair of four Polaroid self-portraits Janet Bayly makes a strong statement about her emotional state of introverted sadness. In the second two, made a year later, she has photographed her body as visual subject-matter without the sense of obsessive self-preoccupation of the first two.

Few people inhabit her photographs. They are usually seen at a distance, or blurred as in a dream. However; she has included a group of portraits in 35mm, two of which I thought fine with the richness and softness of her work at its best. The portrait of Christine is both a portrait of a particular young woman, and an expression of intense feeling; and the portrait of Roger is a languorous Pre-Raphaelite study of emotional depth.

JANET BAYLY
Roger, March, 1978
black-and-white photograph
(Snaps Gallery)

For this photographer, the tone of darkness symbolizes emotional intensity: as 1n her 35mm black-and-white photo of a very dark room with a window and a mirror reflecting the light. If we are prepared to peer into the photograph we can see the details of the room. This is a deliberate, subjective darkness - not the result of underexposed negatives or overexposed prints. However, as her work progresses, Janet Bayly may find print darkness unnecessary as a device in intensifying images that are already strong in their silence, stillness and introspection.