Open all hours

Press, 6 July 1983, Page 14

Open all hours

The night-time world of fast-food, jukeboxes, video games, pin-ball machines and street kids features in an exhibition of photographs in the Robert McDougall Art Gallery over the next few weeks.

The 20 photographs in the exhibition show life in and around “The Dog House” — the fast-food outlet in Cathedral Square which has raised the ire of many wellintentioned Christchurch citizens.

Called “The Dog HouseSells Hot-Dogs,” the exhibition is the work of Christopher Matthews. He took the photographs during the winter of 1978. Mr Matthews is reluctant to make “grand statements” about his work. “The photographs and the way I have presented them are what I want to say.” He will go so far as to say that he was attracted to “The Dog House,” especially at night, because he was living near the square and became interested in the life of the central city. “At that time ‘The Dog House’ had an energy about it. People gathered there because it was one of the few places that was open all night,” he says. “ ‘The Dog House’ was quite a special scenario, a very commercial place.”

In an introduction to the exhibition, which includes comments from the street kids whom he photographed, Mr Matthews says the scene had “an exuberance, muscle and glamour,” which contrasted vividly with the harsher realities of urban existence. At night it became the focus of energy and individual personalities; brought together amid the steam and smell of food, the music and “the whirring, bopping, flashing products of a high-tech, instant youth culture.

“It offered a transient, if often precarious security in the face of uncertain times,”

he says. He agrees that the photographs make a social comment, but it is something he does not like -to talk about. “The comment is in the photographs themselves,” he says. “The work is the provoking thing, not what I have to say. I want them to be seen as photographs, yet also having a social context.”

Mr Matthews, who is from the Hawke’s Bay, took the photographs while he was attending the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. His interest is in people and what is happening in New Zealand. “The project is not really photo-journalism, but I like the idea of photography exploring the world,” he says. He likes photography because it transcends the subjectivity of arts such as drawing. “As an image-making process it has a kind of magic about it. It seems to objectify, in an almost removed way, experiences and feelings,” he says.

Now Mr Matthews lives in Napier, he has started on a new project called “Citizens of Napier.” In it, he says he is trying “to pin down the essential things that are peculiar to Napier.” Although it has taken nearly five years to bring the “Dog House” exhibition together, he believes it is still relevant because of the spread of games parlours, and fast-food outlets. He could have shown the photographs before now, but feels it is important that it opens in Christchurch first. He visited Christchurch last September to seek out some of the people whose photographs are included in the exhibition and got positive responses. “The photographs recorded an element of their own lives and they made them remember friends and events.”