Contemporary photography

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33925, 19 August 1975, Page 28

Contemporary photography

(By

J.R.W.)

A survey exhibition of contemporary New Zealand photography, “The Active Eye,” organised by the Manawatu Art Gallery, is on show at the McDougall Gallery, where it will remain until August 30. The selection was made in a manner designed to show 12 established photographers exhibiting by invitation, alongside a representative survey of recent work by less-well-known photographers. Forty of the latter, who responded to a general invitation for consideration as potential exhibitors, are represented.

As may reasonably be expected of an exhibition organised in such a manner, the results are very patchy, ranging from images of the power of Marti Friedlander

to the eclecticism of Hedwig’s Dibbets and Dekkerderived “Timaru landscape,’’ to a blandness of Whyte, McCallum, or Hewson, and the contrived multiple printing of Boroughs. It shows New Zealand photography, a recent arrival on the visual arts scene, as healthy, and seeking often to establish a particularised national visioned through its choice of subject, albeit regularly an American derived form of social realism. As a reversal of the painter’s long debt to photography, a number of photo-

graphers have employed a choice of image made possible, in the case of Donovan’s “Family Series No. 5,” by Nevelson’s sculpture, in Kirk’s “Custom St Auckland,” Van Toan’s “Kelp,” Fitzgerald’s “KA locomotive” and Boer’s “Untitled,” by painting. In fact, the process has come the full circle when we consider how interdependent the vision is, employed in Futurist cinematic painting . and Tolladay’s “Wellington winter,” with its blurred figures implying motion, continuity of time and the constantly-changing aspect of the location. This same episodic continuity, expanded in scope, is to be found in Hedwig’s four sequences of “Wall Passing People.” There are a number of works in which the nude or portions of the female anatomy form the principle motif — almost all conventional images of a type with which we have been familiar for some time. Most interesting are Morrison’s “Nude II” and Baigent’s “Samantha Groves.” The choice of the nude smacks a little of a puritanical self-stimulus appearing more often to be the product of a subjective interest in using the naked female than the means to achieve some unique photographic idea. Nor is it without implied sensuality in King’s “Friends" or unsubtle eroticism in Clark’s two “Dances.”

The portrait comes in for frequent attention — in Van Toan’s “Portrait” it is a highly-conventional attitude modelled with- a delicate tonality, in Stone’s case it is bland except for that of “Pat Fowler,” a striking strong photograph of a lean ascetic figure. Social commentary is everywhere in' evidence — in Ans Westra’s hands it is a sympathetic expose; in Miller’s images of police activities and disenchanted unionism it is a latent violence; in Busch’s, it a savagery stemming from his choice of subject. The most memorable images range from a commonplace view of tussock grass by Blackmann, with an extraordinarly delicate and finely-textured expanse of grass, to Buis’s “Couple" and Oettli’s disarmingly surreal vision of a vast floor, relieved only by a crop of telephones.

It is an interesting exhibition revealing some of the strength and a good many weaknesses in contemporary’ New Zealand photography. It is, of course, a selection, and like al! selection surveys, its value rests and falls on the criteria applied by the selection panel. In this case the exhibition might have been strengthened through a greater representation by the 12 invited photographers, but then its value as a gauge of what is happening over a broad spectrum would have been eliminated, or at best, substantially reduced.