Views/Exposures

Press, 29 March 1984, Page 19

Views/Exposures

‘Views/Exposures.’ Ten contemporary New Zealand photographers. At the Robert McDougall Art Gallery until April 29. Reviewed by John Hurrell. The National Gallery in Wellington has organised this touring exhibition, containing the works of 10 photographers and curated by Peter Ireland. It presents 107 photographic images, so in a sense it is really 10 small exhibitions rolled into one. It comes at an appropriate time to coincide with the large “Paperchase” exhibition.

Touring photographic exhibitions of this quality do not appear often in Christchurch, although we do have photographers in this city whose works are of the same standard, and in some cases better. In spite of this we tend to suffer from a glut of poor photography here, just as we do with poor painting. This exhibition is by no means perfect; it has its serious weakness, but it indicates the variety of approaches photographers have to the use of their medium.

Laurence Aberhart’s large contact prints are well known in Christchurch. His selenium and gold-toned images, with their very subtle distortions of space, have a still, eerie, dreamlike quality as if the buildings and monuments he records have been transported to his darkroom from another time. These beautifully composed works have overtones of nostalgia in their content and in the

effects of the old-fashioned plate camera he uses to make them.

Gillian Chaplin’s large, coloured prints of the Desert Road, and of the hulls of boats with their dangling mooring lines, impress with their size and with her care in arranging the trianguler shapes and diagonal lines within the frame. Some of these simple images come close to abstract paintings with their use of nuance and tension between the elements, contained within her very careful compositions. The documentary photographs of Fiona Clark record the traditional life style of the Te Atiawa people of North Taranaki. These moving images explain in explicit detail, via a written commentary, how their food from their reefs and rivers is threatened by pollution from sewage, agricultural chemicals, and the petrochemical industry. Bruce Foster’s elegant compositions are akin to Chaplin’s in their emphasis on organisation, except his works are much more static, with an emphasis on horizontal forms acting as a foil for the occasional diagonal see-saw or cloud form. Peter Hannken’s most successful works are of egg on a plate with a teapot, and a triptych based on a fluttering beach flag. These images have a bold, dynamic quality missing from many of his others. Robin Morrison’s North Island photographs have the vivid detail and the richness

of colour he is known for, and Ann Noble’s 10 amusing photographs are presented as images from a suite on the theme of sexual encounter.

Peter Peryer’s five identical black and white photographs of an unclothed male torso are too ambiguous and eccentric to convey any precise meaning. They could be about darkroom techniques, the defusing of shock through repetition, sexual mores, or even art history. They look good as five objects on the wall.

The polaroid works of Janet Bayley and Dinah Bradley fare badly in this show. They look inconsequential, and pretentious when presented in large mounts. They are poor examples of what can be done in this medium.

“Views/Exposures”’ is a good show but not a great one. Some of the prints are too dark to perceive detail clearly, and the exhibition would have benefited greatly by a careful selection of key works. Some of the photographers overlap in their subject matter, making the exhibition a bit monotonous, and there is no evidence of any real experimentation in the way images can be combined together, or used with other methods from the visual arts. In spite of this disappointing conservativeness, along with perhaps too much emphasis on elegance, this fine exhibition is certainly well worth a visit.