Old New World, Real Time (This interview appears in my book Old New World.)
Mary Macpherson interviewed by Gregory O’Brien
No one ever experiences a place except at a single time, and no one experiences a single time except in one place. That might be a philosophical truism, but it’s also a fact of driving a car through rural New Zealand. The landscape shifts; time shifts. Accordingly, there are two continuums to bear in mind. And this is something Mary Macpherson’s photographs draw our attention to. We arrive at the first photograph in this series at 4.18pm—as registered on the Foxton town clock, which hovers at the centre of the image like a sun or moon. The image registers a specific time as it does a place. Time presides over the first image as, more obliquely, it does over all the subsequent photographs.
Just as the wheels of the car measure speed and distance travelled in the physical world, so the rotating hands on the town clock measure ‘the time it takes’. While Macpherson’s photographs lead us forwards on a linear, albeit discontinuous, journey, the objects, buildings, plants and geographical forms in her images shunt us forwards and backwards in time. Old time, new time, any time.
In ‘Old New World’, Macpherson has cleared a space between the words ‘Old’ and ‘New’ and located the World, as she finds it, in the partial clearance between them. Having been a party to a conversation between the new-fangled and the archaic, last year’s model and the latest thing, the viewer is also drawn into a number of other transitory situations. He or she is posited between motion and stillness, between that which is ignored and that which is attended to... The images are characterised by all manner of continuities and disjunctions. Macpherson’s images explore the ongoing paradox of how a medium fixated upon the single moment might be married to a car journey. The recurrent question is not only where on earth we are, but also what time it is.
Given the to-ing and fro-ing of the images, an interview/conversation seemed to us an appropriate approach to exploring some the issues raised by these images. Imagine, then, the artist and the present writer in a car, travelling a circuitous route around all the locations that these images touch upon, brush up against or somehow dig beneath the surface of. We are hoping to be heard above the din of small town radio and the gravelly hum of tyres—the aural and visual textures of the photographs themselves--but if those sounds drown out our conversation then that is entirely consistent with the project.
~
GREG: I'm interested in the extent to which you think these images have a story to tell – a linear narrative concerning the evolution (and devolution) of rural New Zealand. You capture these buildings/structures at a particular moment –
a particularly articulate moment. Yet, at the same time, there is often a sense that the moment in time you have touched down upon is itself far from fixed or resolved. There is a sense that Time, in these images, is paradoxical, inconsistent, confused, bothered and even nonsensical. Perhaps there is even an element of self-parody in these structures and their surroundings.
MARY: I think you’re talking about the triangle between the object of the photograph, the way it’s photographed and the editorial story telling in the book.
Firstly the buildings and streets exist in their own time and have their own history and place in that town or on the highway. That’s independent of any photograph or representation.
Image-making is something else.
I’m the person who stops in town for a few hours or perhaps stays a couple of nights and then drives on. I’m a spectator in the same way as any visitor to that place and I wanted to preserve that viewpoint, at the same time as I was looking carefully and intently.
So: a position, but one that doesn’t assume that I’m intimate with a place or have any special authority to pin things down.
As the project went on and as the narrative took shape, some of my looking was guided by the stories I wanted to record, while – and here’s a contradiction – allowing myself to be pulled along by the content. That’s the intuitive, emotional response that allows you to make photographs.
I wanted to resist an over-determined approach that would say ‘here’s an example of X type of building’ or ‘Y type of street’. I wanted the poetry of place to be in the photographs and I love the contradictions and side conversations that buildings have with their streets and surroundings.
When I shaped the work into the Old New World narrative it was to tell the story of a shift from a traditional New Zealand, to places of prosperity and development that look very different to the 1960s and 70s. That’s the overall arc of the work.
Within that I felt it important to tell the stories of the major trends that I saw over the seven years I spent visiting places – the towns painting up the main street to attract custom and celebrate their identity, places that remained resolutely themselves and those that were dipping towards decline.
GREG: To what extent do you think the images, en masse, conform to or confound linear narrative?
MARY: I wanted the work to have multiple narratives about what was happening because that was the most accurate way I could portray the experience.
So – to finally answer your last question – there is an overall direction to the work, but one that allows side stories and deviations, driven by the messiness of life, and my photographic response to that.
GREG: I'm also interested in the fact that the vast majority of your subjects are found on through-roads--these are places characterised by their semi-non-existence...their status as towns on the way to other, more important, towns. These places are usually cursed by motorists on account of their 70kmph speed limits. Maybe your fixed, stationary images are in dramatic contrast to the very blurred reality that exists on either side of the viewfinder as you drive though these half-way/truckstop towns. What do you think you are holding onto here--and do these structures want to be held onto?
MARY: The most ambitious thing I could do was to stop in those places and walk around and think about what I was seeing. In New Zealand, the photographic work about the reality of driving through is MOVING PICTURES by Peter Black.
My work is about the slowness of looking and letting things come to you in the viewfinder. When I’m photographing a building or a structure I’m thinking ‘feel the language of the building, understand its emotion’, and I’m trying to see, as clearly as possible, into the scene. Hopefully, if I’ve done all that, a viewer will be able to follow me into the picture.
My photographs are also made by someone just walking down the street, perhaps at midday when the light is at its hardest, perhaps in the softness of evening, and I tried to let some of the temporary, improvised nature of those encounters into the work.
The photographs are really a combination of a considered formal approach, even though I’m not working with a large format camera, while letting in some street energy and trying to acknowledge provisional nature of the exchange.
Perhaps that’s why the structures don’t look as if they want to be held onto!
On a ‘real world’ level, things change, even in slow paced places. Buildings get painted over, demolished, converted to other uses, and look completely different in different light or from other viewpoints or angles. Photographs never tell the truth and perhaps you could ask the question, what single truth is there to tell?
GREG: How, then, do you see these works in relation to your earlier series of photographs which focussed on detritus and debris (in TILTING AT NATURE) and then the series of 'shopping' photographs which was shown at City Gallery Wellington and reproduced in the literary journal SPORT? It seems you're interested in what gets left behind / discarded on one hand and that which is consumed on the other.
MARY: In my work, whether it’s photographs of scenarios I’ve constructed, and then photographed, or straight photography, I’ve been interested in the way the world works. I seem to have a drive to try to understand in quite a holistic way, and I’m drawn to trying to represent multiple dimensions, or processes of change. Perhaps I just believe things are complicated!
For example in a series from the 1990s called WHITE THREAD where I photographed a selection of white clothes, I explored the things that people desire or fear. In LOWER HUTT, TWO PUBLIC PLACES, which was commissioned for my show TILTING AT NATURE, I photographed official landscaped areas of the city and its vacant land, which tends to accumulate rubbish and ‘unofficial’ plants. I was just interested in how quickly our familiar world tips from one extreme to another.
17 DAYS OF SHOPPING is a work where I photographed all the food and groceries I brought home over 17 days. In part the work was driven by an interest in the aesthetics of an automatic selection process (part of an ongoing fascination with Ed Ruscha’s Sunset Strip buildings). Another motive was to explore how we experience food through the supermarket shelf and the social change in New Zealand that this represents.
In OLD NEW WORLD I’m interested in a change that’s occurred in New Zealand society in my lifetime and how that’s represented in buildings, street, artworks etc – the public containers of our history and identity. I think it’s part of trying to understand my world and where I fit in it. In that sense photography is a form of thinking and self discovery.
GREG: Also, the earlier series of photos, and, in a roundabout sort of way, the recent ones of buildings, seem to fit into a notion of 'still life' image-making... When I look at the images featuring DB and Tiger Tea, for some reason the phrase ‘product placement’ comes to mind.
MARY: I don’t think of the photographs of OLD NEW WORLD as still lives or product placements, both things that imply a high degree of control by the maker.
GREG: I meant ‘still life’ in an unorthodox sense... I was thinking of the way the composition is concentrated around the central stone in ‘Otaki’ or around the brass band items in ‘Roxburgh’. The status of these objects is elusive—they could be relics, cast-offs or National Treasures? There’s an intriguing degree of randomness and deliberation in these manifestations, or maybe I could call them apparitions...
MARY: The OLD NEW WORLD images are the result of intense concentration and paying attention. I choose the light, the angle and focus but these choices are driven by what the subject is saying to me and what I’m trying to express. It’s a constant pull between the photographer’s intentions (an expression of who you are and your life experience) and what the subject is brings to the picture. The tension between these two forces is one of the things I find continually fascinating about making photographs.
GREG: Do you think the recent photographs capture or touch upon some notion of quintessential New Zealand or something else entirely?
MARY: One of the things I especially didn’t want to do was to make a statement about quintessential New Zealand.
Being aware of the image making that’s been done about New Zealand, whether commercially or in the art world, I wanted to navigate right away from the ‘heartland’ community, eccentricity, a sense of isolation, or big statements about the colonial past.
But that said I hoped the images would carry a quality of being made in this country, without being forced.
I think that all countries have qualities – whether of their light, colour palette, spatial relationships, structures etc that show through in image making. After seven years of travelling and looking at New Zealand my adjectives for it are ‘little, quick and vivid.’
I think that means something about the intense, compressed nature of a landscape that changes very quickly, the intimacy of towns and the bright paint on buildings and signs that seems to match the intensity of grass – whether green or drought brown.
I also became very interested in the way that an instant ‘New Zealandness’ had sprung up in murals, advertisements and public artworks – often drawing on regional or national history. Those things, combined with older identity symbols such as war memorials, seem to be saying ‘hello, this is us, this is our public expression of who we are, or where we’ve come from.’
I wanted to show some of that and incorporate how these symbols relate to their surroundings.
GREG: You mention two forces: the photographer (their life experiences etc) and the subject...with that relationship in mind, the works are a kind of dialogue. But what other forces and presences do you feel enter into the equation?
MARY: It’s hard to separate out all the forces that go into making a photograph – so many of them come from your own mind or subconscious. Two things I become aware of, as the work progressed, was how it revolved around a pole of memory of my childhood and teenage holidays in a small Maniototo town which had a general store, monument, big trees, church, community hall and domain. All covered by a wide blue sky and on an intimate human scale. Of course, that world doesn’t necessarily exist now, but it seemed to be an important invisible centre for the work.
I also become increasingly attuned to the social, economic and cultural differences between places and regions and felt I needed to represent these differences fairly in the work. That became quite an important driver in my picture making and selection.
GREG: Moving away from 'New Zealandness', there is a relationship to American culture lurking not far beneath the surface of the photographs. Or is it just that as soon as we see a prefabricated building or dodgy commercial architecture, we think of the American South?
MARY: There have been some highly influential works done about buildings in the American South. For me these are exemplified by William Christenberry’s intensely evocative photographs, sculptures and paintings of decaying buildings in Hale County, Alabama. They are some of the most moving artworks about the past I’ve seen. (In my other life as a poet I’ve written a long poem called Two Trees, in part, based on his work – published in SPORT 36, 2008) His predecessor, Walker Evans, also made some significant and influential works about the South, in Hale County, which were published as LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN.
But, if we associate the American South with these types of buildings, I suspect there are worldly forces at play too. For example, the access that American photographers have to publication and distribution, the depth of photographic scholarship that underpins that and their closeness to world art centres. It makes a difference to what gets seen and remembered, world wide.
GREG: That, in turn, brings us to the relationship between these photographs and the work of American photographers such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Joel Meyerowitz. Are they abiding spirits over this project? And beyond America, what other influences might you be conscious of?
MARY: I should disclaim influence by Robert Frank. He’s made a seminal and powerful work in THE AMERICANS, but he’s never been essential for me as a photographer. Also Joel Meyerowitz. While I admire his eloquence and really like the formal beauty and adventure in a book like CAPE LIGHT, it wasn’t an important work to me in taking these photographs.
The works I thought about before making these photographs were Stephen Shore’s UNCOMMON PLACES, for his photographing of everyday streets and buildings with tremendous formal sophistication, Joel Sternfeld’s AMERICAN PROSPECTS with his restrained, yet socially charged images and Walker Evan’s photographs of buildings with their intellectual and psychological complexity.
But when I began making my photographs I found that, other projects, made in another country with large format view cameras, weren’t necessarily that helpful. More than anything I became engrossed in the subjects I was photographing and let the content pull me along and guide my decisions.
Maybe it was the permission to look and photograph in the main street, and the examples of social narratives with depth and coherence, that were the essential influences that I took away.
GREG: How do you see these works fitting within contemporary New Zealand photography? Or is that something you don't think about--that's what curators and commentators are for, after all. At the same time, I feel compelled to ask if you locate these works, and their production, within a community of photographers and their practices?
MARY: I’m aware of and look closely at the work done by New Zealand photographers, particularly the work about journeys around New Zealand and explorations of place and identity.
I’m pleased to be making work in a context, rather than in splendid isolation, but I find it hard to have a clear view of how I fit into my own backyard. Perhaps other people will have to answer that question.
A New Zealand photographer I should acknowledge is my partner Peter Black. We work on different projects, with completely different aesthetics, but his example of how much hard work is required, and how high you have to raise the bar to make a series with any depth or significance has been a very important spur for me in making this work.
Mary Macpherson interviewed by Gregory O’Brien
No one ever experiences a place except at a single time, and no one experiences a single time except in one place. That might be a philosophical truism, but it’s also a fact of driving a car through rural New Zealand. The landscape shifts; time shifts. Accordingly, there are two continuums to bear in mind. And this is something Mary Macpherson’s photographs draw our attention to. We arrive at the first photograph in this series at 4.18pm—as registered on the Foxton town clock, which hovers at the centre of the image like a sun or moon. The image registers a specific time as it does a place. Time presides over the first image as, more obliquely, it does over all the subsequent photographs.
Just as the wheels of the car measure speed and distance travelled in the physical world, so the rotating hands on the town clock measure ‘the time it takes’. While Macpherson’s photographs lead us forwards on a linear, albeit discontinuous, journey, the objects, buildings, plants and geographical forms in her images shunt us forwards and backwards in time. Old time, new time, any time.
In ‘Old New World’, Macpherson has cleared a space between the words ‘Old’ and ‘New’ and located the World, as she finds it, in the partial clearance between them. Having been a party to a conversation between the new-fangled and the archaic, last year’s model and the latest thing, the viewer is also drawn into a number of other transitory situations. He or she is posited between motion and stillness, between that which is ignored and that which is attended to... The images are characterised by all manner of continuities and disjunctions. Macpherson’s images explore the ongoing paradox of how a medium fixated upon the single moment might be married to a car journey. The recurrent question is not only where on earth we are, but also what time it is.
Given the to-ing and fro-ing of the images, an interview/conversation seemed to us an appropriate approach to exploring some the issues raised by these images. Imagine, then, the artist and the present writer in a car, travelling a circuitous route around all the locations that these images touch upon, brush up against or somehow dig beneath the surface of. We are hoping to be heard above the din of small town radio and the gravelly hum of tyres—the aural and visual textures of the photographs themselves--but if those sounds drown out our conversation then that is entirely consistent with the project.
~
GREG: I'm interested in the extent to which you think these images have a story to tell – a linear narrative concerning the evolution (and devolution) of rural New Zealand. You capture these buildings/structures at a particular moment –
a particularly articulate moment. Yet, at the same time, there is often a sense that the moment in time you have touched down upon is itself far from fixed or resolved. There is a sense that Time, in these images, is paradoxical, inconsistent, confused, bothered and even nonsensical. Perhaps there is even an element of self-parody in these structures and their surroundings.
MARY: I think you’re talking about the triangle between the object of the photograph, the way it’s photographed and the editorial story telling in the book.
Firstly the buildings and streets exist in their own time and have their own history and place in that town or on the highway. That’s independent of any photograph or representation.
Image-making is something else.
I’m the person who stops in town for a few hours or perhaps stays a couple of nights and then drives on. I’m a spectator in the same way as any visitor to that place and I wanted to preserve that viewpoint, at the same time as I was looking carefully and intently.
So: a position, but one that doesn’t assume that I’m intimate with a place or have any special authority to pin things down.
As the project went on and as the narrative took shape, some of my looking was guided by the stories I wanted to record, while – and here’s a contradiction – allowing myself to be pulled along by the content. That’s the intuitive, emotional response that allows you to make photographs.
I wanted to resist an over-determined approach that would say ‘here’s an example of X type of building’ or ‘Y type of street’. I wanted the poetry of place to be in the photographs and I love the contradictions and side conversations that buildings have with their streets and surroundings.
When I shaped the work into the Old New World narrative it was to tell the story of a shift from a traditional New Zealand, to places of prosperity and development that look very different to the 1960s and 70s. That’s the overall arc of the work.
Within that I felt it important to tell the stories of the major trends that I saw over the seven years I spent visiting places – the towns painting up the main street to attract custom and celebrate their identity, places that remained resolutely themselves and those that were dipping towards decline.
GREG: To what extent do you think the images, en masse, conform to or confound linear narrative?
MARY: I wanted the work to have multiple narratives about what was happening because that was the most accurate way I could portray the experience.
So – to finally answer your last question – there is an overall direction to the work, but one that allows side stories and deviations, driven by the messiness of life, and my photographic response to that.
GREG: I'm also interested in the fact that the vast majority of your subjects are found on through-roads--these are places characterised by their semi-non-existence...their status as towns on the way to other, more important, towns. These places are usually cursed by motorists on account of their 70kmph speed limits. Maybe your fixed, stationary images are in dramatic contrast to the very blurred reality that exists on either side of the viewfinder as you drive though these half-way/truckstop towns. What do you think you are holding onto here--and do these structures want to be held onto?
MARY: The most ambitious thing I could do was to stop in those places and walk around and think about what I was seeing. In New Zealand, the photographic work about the reality of driving through is MOVING PICTURES by Peter Black.
My work is about the slowness of looking and letting things come to you in the viewfinder. When I’m photographing a building or a structure I’m thinking ‘feel the language of the building, understand its emotion’, and I’m trying to see, as clearly as possible, into the scene. Hopefully, if I’ve done all that, a viewer will be able to follow me into the picture.
My photographs are also made by someone just walking down the street, perhaps at midday when the light is at its hardest, perhaps in the softness of evening, and I tried to let some of the temporary, improvised nature of those encounters into the work.
The photographs are really a combination of a considered formal approach, even though I’m not working with a large format camera, while letting in some street energy and trying to acknowledge provisional nature of the exchange.
Perhaps that’s why the structures don’t look as if they want to be held onto!
On a ‘real world’ level, things change, even in slow paced places. Buildings get painted over, demolished, converted to other uses, and look completely different in different light or from other viewpoints or angles. Photographs never tell the truth and perhaps you could ask the question, what single truth is there to tell?
GREG: How, then, do you see these works in relation to your earlier series of photographs which focussed on detritus and debris (in TILTING AT NATURE) and then the series of 'shopping' photographs which was shown at City Gallery Wellington and reproduced in the literary journal SPORT? It seems you're interested in what gets left behind / discarded on one hand and that which is consumed on the other.
MARY: In my work, whether it’s photographs of scenarios I’ve constructed, and then photographed, or straight photography, I’ve been interested in the way the world works. I seem to have a drive to try to understand in quite a holistic way, and I’m drawn to trying to represent multiple dimensions, or processes of change. Perhaps I just believe things are complicated!
For example in a series from the 1990s called WHITE THREAD where I photographed a selection of white clothes, I explored the things that people desire or fear. In LOWER HUTT, TWO PUBLIC PLACES, which was commissioned for my show TILTING AT NATURE, I photographed official landscaped areas of the city and its vacant land, which tends to accumulate rubbish and ‘unofficial’ plants. I was just interested in how quickly our familiar world tips from one extreme to another.
17 DAYS OF SHOPPING is a work where I photographed all the food and groceries I brought home over 17 days. In part the work was driven by an interest in the aesthetics of an automatic selection process (part of an ongoing fascination with Ed Ruscha’s Sunset Strip buildings). Another motive was to explore how we experience food through the supermarket shelf and the social change in New Zealand that this represents.
In OLD NEW WORLD I’m interested in a change that’s occurred in New Zealand society in my lifetime and how that’s represented in buildings, street, artworks etc – the public containers of our history and identity. I think it’s part of trying to understand my world and where I fit in it. In that sense photography is a form of thinking and self discovery.
GREG: Also, the earlier series of photos, and, in a roundabout sort of way, the recent ones of buildings, seem to fit into a notion of 'still life' image-making... When I look at the images featuring DB and Tiger Tea, for some reason the phrase ‘product placement’ comes to mind.
MARY: I don’t think of the photographs of OLD NEW WORLD as still lives or product placements, both things that imply a high degree of control by the maker.
GREG: I meant ‘still life’ in an unorthodox sense... I was thinking of the way the composition is concentrated around the central stone in ‘Otaki’ or around the brass band items in ‘Roxburgh’. The status of these objects is elusive—they could be relics, cast-offs or National Treasures? There’s an intriguing degree of randomness and deliberation in these manifestations, or maybe I could call them apparitions...
MARY: The OLD NEW WORLD images are the result of intense concentration and paying attention. I choose the light, the angle and focus but these choices are driven by what the subject is saying to me and what I’m trying to express. It’s a constant pull between the photographer’s intentions (an expression of who you are and your life experience) and what the subject is brings to the picture. The tension between these two forces is one of the things I find continually fascinating about making photographs.
GREG: Do you think the recent photographs capture or touch upon some notion of quintessential New Zealand or something else entirely?
MARY: One of the things I especially didn’t want to do was to make a statement about quintessential New Zealand.
Being aware of the image making that’s been done about New Zealand, whether commercially or in the art world, I wanted to navigate right away from the ‘heartland’ community, eccentricity, a sense of isolation, or big statements about the colonial past.
But that said I hoped the images would carry a quality of being made in this country, without being forced.
I think that all countries have qualities – whether of their light, colour palette, spatial relationships, structures etc that show through in image making. After seven years of travelling and looking at New Zealand my adjectives for it are ‘little, quick and vivid.’
I think that means something about the intense, compressed nature of a landscape that changes very quickly, the intimacy of towns and the bright paint on buildings and signs that seems to match the intensity of grass – whether green or drought brown.
I also became very interested in the way that an instant ‘New Zealandness’ had sprung up in murals, advertisements and public artworks – often drawing on regional or national history. Those things, combined with older identity symbols such as war memorials, seem to be saying ‘hello, this is us, this is our public expression of who we are, or where we’ve come from.’
I wanted to show some of that and incorporate how these symbols relate to their surroundings.
GREG: You mention two forces: the photographer (their life experiences etc) and the subject...with that relationship in mind, the works are a kind of dialogue. But what other forces and presences do you feel enter into the equation?
MARY: It’s hard to separate out all the forces that go into making a photograph – so many of them come from your own mind or subconscious. Two things I become aware of, as the work progressed, was how it revolved around a pole of memory of my childhood and teenage holidays in a small Maniototo town which had a general store, monument, big trees, church, community hall and domain. All covered by a wide blue sky and on an intimate human scale. Of course, that world doesn’t necessarily exist now, but it seemed to be an important invisible centre for the work.
I also become increasingly attuned to the social, economic and cultural differences between places and regions and felt I needed to represent these differences fairly in the work. That became quite an important driver in my picture making and selection.
GREG: Moving away from 'New Zealandness', there is a relationship to American culture lurking not far beneath the surface of the photographs. Or is it just that as soon as we see a prefabricated building or dodgy commercial architecture, we think of the American South?
MARY: There have been some highly influential works done about buildings in the American South. For me these are exemplified by William Christenberry’s intensely evocative photographs, sculptures and paintings of decaying buildings in Hale County, Alabama. They are some of the most moving artworks about the past I’ve seen. (In my other life as a poet I’ve written a long poem called Two Trees, in part, based on his work – published in SPORT 36, 2008) His predecessor, Walker Evans, also made some significant and influential works about the South, in Hale County, which were published as LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN.
But, if we associate the American South with these types of buildings, I suspect there are worldly forces at play too. For example, the access that American photographers have to publication and distribution, the depth of photographic scholarship that underpins that and their closeness to world art centres. It makes a difference to what gets seen and remembered, world wide.
GREG: That, in turn, brings us to the relationship between these photographs and the work of American photographers such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank and Joel Meyerowitz. Are they abiding spirits over this project? And beyond America, what other influences might you be conscious of?
MARY: I should disclaim influence by Robert Frank. He’s made a seminal and powerful work in THE AMERICANS, but he’s never been essential for me as a photographer. Also Joel Meyerowitz. While I admire his eloquence and really like the formal beauty and adventure in a book like CAPE LIGHT, it wasn’t an important work to me in taking these photographs.
The works I thought about before making these photographs were Stephen Shore’s UNCOMMON PLACES, for his photographing of everyday streets and buildings with tremendous formal sophistication, Joel Sternfeld’s AMERICAN PROSPECTS with his restrained, yet socially charged images and Walker Evan’s photographs of buildings with their intellectual and psychological complexity.
But when I began making my photographs I found that, other projects, made in another country with large format view cameras, weren’t necessarily that helpful. More than anything I became engrossed in the subjects I was photographing and let the content pull me along and guide my decisions.
Maybe it was the permission to look and photograph in the main street, and the examples of social narratives with depth and coherence, that were the essential influences that I took away.
GREG: How do you see these works fitting within contemporary New Zealand photography? Or is that something you don't think about--that's what curators and commentators are for, after all. At the same time, I feel compelled to ask if you locate these works, and their production, within a community of photographers and their practices?
MARY: I’m aware of and look closely at the work done by New Zealand photographers, particularly the work about journeys around New Zealand and explorations of place and identity.
I’m pleased to be making work in a context, rather than in splendid isolation, but I find it hard to have a clear view of how I fit into my own backyard. Perhaps other people will have to answer that question.
A New Zealand photographer I should acknowledge is my partner Peter Black. We work on different projects, with completely different aesthetics, but his example of how much hard work is required, and how high you have to raise the bar to make a series with any depth or significance has been a very important spur for me in making this work.