Endeavour by Anton Maurer - book review

Endeavour, by Anton Maurer

Bad News Books, Te Whanganui-a-Tāra, 2022

Reviewed for PhotoForum by David Eggleton, August 2022

'I live at the edge of the universe / like everyone else,' Bill Manhire writes in his poem, 'Milky Way Bar'. The poem continues: '... my whole pleasure is in the inconspicuous; / I love the unimportant thing ... I ... watch the Martian invaders ... pointing at what they want.'

Anton Maurer's photobook Endeavour is a collection of 35 colour photographs of the New Zealand landscape under a rubric New Zealanders automatically associate with Captain Cook's ship H.M.S. Endeavour and the discovery, or invasion, of New Zealand by European colonisers, who, to tangata whenua, were 'pointing at what they want'.

The word 'endeavour' itself suggests trying to make sense of something seen, as through an eighteenth-century naval telescope, or a twenty-first-century view-camera's lens, focusing on the inconspicuous, the unimportant-seeming thing. Endeavour also implies effort, enterprise, overcoming obstacles. To tame, harness and domesticate the wilderness, to turn 'wasteland' to profitable land is a form of cultural work and in colonial-era New Zealand this transformation, conducted with evangelical and imperial fervour, was documented by nineteenth-century topographic photographers, who included John Kinder, Daniel Mundy and William Bragge. Their photographs survive as historical documents, marking the temporal, but also as aesthetic artefacts. Anton Maurer's work in this selection is partly a homage to their influence. His methodology— the long stare, the cool gaze, the careful framing surveying terrains forcefully altered by human intervention within a contemporary political context — also invokes the American topographic tradition. More especially the latter-day deadpan staring of Stephen Shore, Robert Adams, Richard Misrach and others, whose images demonstrate an often bitter recognition of capitalist triumphalism.

Maurer's photographs in Endeavour are carefully-composed: distanced, empirical, questioning; and there's also an unease, an anxiety, evident beneath his calm surfaces as he explores landscape legacies of industrialism, globalisation and the free market. He knows that nowadays the term 'endeavour' can sound hubristic or commodified, having been appropriated as corporate brochure jargon. 'Endeavour' as a term also accords with photography's conquest of New Zealand, completed in the digital age. The landscape has been completely paved or mapped with photographs, albeit digitally on-line.

Endeavour's cover image is a detail of Maurer's photograph, Refining NZ, 2016. While this is a photobook without explanatory text, apart from a few sentences of collegial acknowledgements and a page of laconic factual photo-captions, we might also deduce an ironic or wry edge to a caption where 'refining' could stand for a barbed comment about the New Zealand environment, when what is shown is the Marsden Point Oil Refinery seen from the air.

The cover detail, zooming in on a rather beautiful reef of pinkish-mauve-coloured cloud and offering the suggestion of a radiant sunrise about to unfold, also brings to mind the invention of the Romantic South Seas vista, first presented by the painter William Hodges, the official artist on Captain Cook's second expedition. The paintings by Hodges were inspired by the philosopher Edmund Burke's ideas about the Sublime and the Beautiful in art depictions. Anton Maurer's photograph, though, suggests the Romantic Sublime has curdled somewhat, with the roseate and vaporous sky almost menacing in its candy-floss-hued sweetness in the age of Peak Oil, the age of the Anthropocene, the age of Climate Catastrophe.

Maurer's photo-essay is contrapuntal: images are intended to play off one another, as he investigates contemporary notions of the sublime, the utopian and the dystopian. The photographs en masse carry a sense of Aotearoa New Zealand being crushed in the metal jaws of the neo-liberal paradigm, today, yesterday and tomorrow; still making capitalism work while greenhouse gases increase and the rich retreat to gated, fortress-like communities.

Refining NZ, 2016 as a photograph depicts fossil-fuel infrastructure; but it's a mood piece, the pastel-hued murk suggesting disaffection and estrangement, and reminding us of pollution and damage. Other photographs here are more roadscapes than landscapes, their steep, rocky, bush-clad declivities centred on highways dominated by the presence of trucks and cars travelling through areas that seem perilously eroded. In this blighted garden of Eden people are absent but their impact, their traces, are everywhere. The convoy-like processions of motor vehicles have the baleful air of parasitic bugs or beetles: of insect colonies on the move.

The land itself is shown as subject to industrial-scale extraction, or else mined to exhaustion, is given a touristic make-over and turned into a 'heritage park'. This is the Sublime sliding into slime turned toxic. In Maunguika, 2017, a cargo ship bound for the port of Auckland is gliding past a North Shore headland, while the greyish lustre of the sky as reflected in the water has a sordid, oily undercast. In Tamaki Estuary, 2013 a densely-built-up part of Auckland, with a riverine waterway notorious for pollution, has its whole panorama compressed and flattened by Maurer's angled lens. It looks as dark and shadowy as a carbon sink, an effect underlined by judicious adjustment of colour hues.

This is the plundered earth, a fallen world, a bashed-about landscape, and Mauer is a kind of forensic photographer preparing a portfolio for the case for prosecution — in a way a climate justice warrior. He predicts terminal beaches coated with ballast discharge, microplastic inundation, and random debris from Rena-style shipping containers overboard. Here are heirloom landscapes of a paradise lost, cluttered with cast-off contemporary junk.

Maurer's work is, then, in dialogue with other New Zealand landscape photography, in particular the nostalgic iconography of the standard scenic photograph. He gestures towards a conflicted and concealed history beneath the scenic photograph's celebration of sites of collective memory: our pristine mountains and beaches as featured throughout the twentieth century. One way he does this is by focusing on things normally screened out in order to offer a sense of visual collision, of lugubrious juxtaposition. Another is through recognition that photographs usually beautify with their colour palette; Maurer wants to quiz that colour range and its emotive meaning to wring out other truths and metaphors.

Hills, summits, high vantage points allow him to subject landscapes to lengthy scrutiny, probing for evidence of power politics in play. At the same time, this viewpoint is that of an ordinary citizen with no special privileges. So he gazes towards the occluded, the sequestered, the hidden: the sign that says no entry beyond this point, the locked gate, the forbidding wall. Democracy demands transparency; invisibility is a type of shield and denial of visual information a form of power. Paying careful attention to construction sites, to property development, peering hard at the veneer of things Maurer elicits not corruption exactly but certainly cynicism and the swaggering arrogance of predatory big money — about which he is ambivalent: detached and curious as much as angry or crusading.

His photographs of property speculation, or 'development', are generally studies in uglification. A rubble-strewn demolition site the size of a rugby field in earthquake-era Christchurch; a special housing project for low-incomes in Auckland that already looks tired and shabby before they have finished building it; the looming, oppressive underside of the Mangere motorway bridge over Manukau Harbour. Is all this clumsy re-development the way to build a new and better landscape? Tacky buildings that look like squat boxes of breakfast cereal, each holding the offer of a free plastic unicorn.

Ringing the changes on 'endeavour' as a form of aspiration, Maurer emphasises building cranes climbing skywards, and apartments under construction made to resemble either fabled towers in some fairy-tale city or else cage-like, prison-like structures. In this late industrial moment, the emphasised whiteness of fossil-fuel tanks and old mining town obelisiks might stand for a sullied purity, marking out not place but globalisation, the folly of imperial monuments or else their absurdity.

There are flashes of comedy amid all the brooding. The first photograph in the book, Freemans Bay School, 2016 reveals a painted mural on a school wall depicting the legendary Maui as the Sun-treader, dragging up Tama-nui-te-rā the Sun-god from the abyss in his flax-rope net, while an incongruous Waste Management dump-bin is positioned in front of the mural. The maw of the Sun-god yawns hungrily, as if the waste-bin is lunch.

Pah Street, Motueka, 2013 offers an image of the Domestic Sublime. Here, poker-faced, Anton Maurer raises an eyebrow at the comedy of a house-proud house, and its fussy exterior decor. If not quite made out of gingerbread this is a house that with all its busy striping has confectionery aspirations, like a licorice knight's black and white castle in the suburbs.

The final photograph in the book, Cape Reinga, 2012, with its downward viewpoint, gives us the well-known lighthouse as a white plug or nipple, a comical knob surmounting the hill crest, an excrescence — and, almost joyful in its splendid isolation, lit up by a beam of sunlight, it seems to be awaiting the next influx of invaders.

David Eggleton is a poet and writer living in Ōtepoti Dunedin.

Anton Maurer, *Te Wahipounamu World Heritage Area, 2015*

Anton Maurer, *Freemans Bay School, 2016*

Anton Maurer, *Pah Street, Motueka, 2013*

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