urban – Page 4 – Thought Factory

architecture, colour, digital, urban, Wellington

art photography in Wellington

December 7, 2015

My last two visits to Wellington ( New Zealand) have enabled me to see that art photography in Wellington looks to be centred around the PhotoSpace gallery that is run by James Gilberd. The gallery opened in 1992 and it is the longest running photographic gallery in New Zealand. It remains the only gallery in the Wellington region dedicated to exhibiting contemporary New Zealand and international photography. It values a high level of craft and has a stable of established, regular exhibitors.

Unfortunately, 147 Cuba Street was closed, when I visited it. Though there are no state funded photography galleries in New Zealand, the City Gallery Wellington, regularly exhibits photography. The nearest photographic gallery to PhotoSpace is the McNamara Gallery in Whanganui. The current exhibition is contemporary ambrotypes and daguerreotypes by Joyce Campbell, and the gallery has good links to contemporary New Zealand photographers and publications.

This gallery has done far more foregrounding New Zealand photography over the past decade than the largely conservative Auckland Art Gallery and Christchurch Art Gallery, which have acted to marginalise photographers vis-a -is the public gallery system. They do so with exhibition programmes that function as if New Zealand photography wasn’t happening, or if they acknowledged photography’s existence, they were noted for their absence over the past couple of decades in dealing with the medium of photography critically.

Coop Bank, Wellington

The established Wellington-based photographers include Mary McPherson, Andrew Ross, Peter Black and Julian Ward. I knew the photographic work of Lester Blair from his Flickr days and came across the photos of Gabrielle Mckone recently whilst photographing in Wellington. I know next to nothing about the critical writing on New Zealand art and photography. I’ve only just discovered that Geoffrey Batchen is currently teaching at Victoria University. That is the extent of my surface knowledge of Wellington art photography.

architecture, colour, film, history, urban

image-movement

October 7, 2015

One shift happening in how we understand photography within the image sphere of late modernity is the emerging recognition that the photographic image—and the image in general— is not an archetype and it is no longer something immobile like a Platonic Form. The image is not outside history and independent, or floating above its context as held by the modernist formalism of Clement Greenberg. The mythical fixity of the image has been broken.

As Giorgio Agamben notes, in sympathy with Gilles Deleuze, the image is mobile: it is an image-movement in the sense that the image is charged with a dynamic tension; a dynamic tension that embodies the movement of history. Our historical experience is obtained by photographic images and photographic images are expressions of our lived history. The image is a still from history and it enters into a constellation with other images.

Grote St, Adelaide

A corresponding shift is the rupture away from the traditional conception of expression assumed in communication in which all expression is realised by a medium—an image or a word or colour—in which the medium disappears in the fully realised expression. The medium is no longer perceived as such–we no longer notice the medium as it disappears in that which it gives us to see. The expression shines forth.

The shift away from this conception is towards a realisation that the image as medium does not disappear into what it makes visible. The image is seen as an image rather than disappearing; or being utterly dependent on the particularity of its context. The image is a kind of force field that holds together opposing forces.
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architecture, Melbourne, urban

the Melbourne connection

May 24, 2015

Though Encounter Studio is located in Victor Harbor in South Australia, it has various connections to Melbourne in Victoria.

I am a member of the Melbourne Silver Mine group and exhibit with them in their annual Uncensored exhibitions at the Collingwood Gallery and subsequent books. I also frequently visit Melbourne to make photos and for phototrips, and I work with Stuart Murdoch exploring topographical photography when I am there. In that sense, Stuart, who has started to publish photography books, can be seen as a part of Encounter Studio: ie.–the Melbourne connection.

Footscray, Melbourne, Victoria

One of the topographical projects Stuart and I are working on is Merri Creek. Stuart had photographed around the Northcote area of Merri Creek approximately 11 years ago when he lived nearby, and he was interested in re-exploring it to see what had changed. I was attracted by the nature/urban relationship. So we decided to start scoping it when I was last in Melbourne.
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architecture, digital, Encounter Studio, urban, Wellington

in Wellington, New Zealand

May 10, 2015

I spent a couple of days in Wellington, New Zealand. I hadn’t been there since I worked in the CBD as an economist and lived in Hataitai on a ridge above the shoreline of Evans Bay in the early 1970s. I was expecting a lot of changes and I was prepared to be rather disorientated.

It was a quick photography trip built around renewing my NZ driving licence and I spent the two days that I had available walking around the CBD and the inner suburbs such as Thorndon; then seeing photography exhibitions and checking out the art hubs/centres when the wind turned into a gale and/or it started raining heavily.

Wellington is a very walkable city, it is easy to get around, and it offers good photographic opportunities due to the CBD being on a narrow coastal plain located between Wellington Harbor and the Wadestown hill face.
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