Morrison photographs

Press, 14 December 1982, Page 26

Morrison photographs

"From the Road.” 50 colour photographs by Robin Morrison, at the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, until January 16. Reviewed by John Hurrell. Robin Morrison is probably best known for his photographs in the "Listener" and for his book which came out last year. "The South Island of New Zealand from the Road.” From the pool of thousands of transparencies taken for his book. Mr Morrison has reselected some, and added others not seen by the public before. This exhibition is more selective than his book, focusing on architectural curiosities, and the people living or working in them, with no solely landscape imagery, except as a backdrop for the dwellings found within it. Where this exhibition falls down is that too many photographs of buildings together tend to become monotonous. A tighter, even more edited show of 30 photographs would have been mor? successful, for not all these photographs are really very interesting. For example, his photograph of the inside of the Dunedin railway station does not look very much different

from the inside of. say. the station at Wellington. Such attempts possibly to romanticise the South Island, bestowing on it qualities which it may not have, are dubious unless substantiated by comparisons with similarly underpopulated and isolated areas of the North Island. The quality of the light found in these prints is a major point of contention. While in the book, the colour of the interiors looks vaguely bleached and slightly faded because of the deficiencies in reproduction, here, as should be expected, in the photographer’s own prints the colour has a richness and a depth not hinted at in the book. There is. of course, also an'increase in scale. The outdoor photographs, however, present problems. They look distractingly dark and subdued when compared with the same photographs in the book or catalogue. Very rarely present is that piercing glare found in most daylight hours. Many look as if they were taken in early morning or late afternoon, and tend to look slightly underexposed. While the colour in some is particularly accurate,, especially when depicting an ominous sky when a storm is

approaching, quite often a blue sky looks too dark to look natural and hints at an attempt to glamourise the subject matter, as is often found in commercial photography. In spite of these points, this exhibition has a great deal to offer, partly through its drawing of attention to various man-made eccentricities that have been built round us. and partly as a documentation of certain aspects of our way of life which are rapidly disappearing.

Although many of the photographs of buildings are too similar to the works of a local photographer. Laurence Aberharl. there are some stunning images to be discovered. These depict human activity round the buildings. A man burning rubbish behind an old tin shed at Birdlings Flat, and a skateboarder using a ramp by the surf bathing pavilion at St Clair beach, are exquisite. This is achieved through Mr Morrison's positioning of the figures in relation to the other shapes in the photographs. They are the highlights of a mixed but ultimately worth-while exhibition.