Photography in a time of distance: a response to the exhibition Falling Shadows

Virginia Woods-Jack, Christine McFetridge, Airini Beautrais

Photospace Gallery, Wellington. 6 March 2020 – 23 March 2020

Essay by Caroline McQuarrie

Book available from Bad News Books

Wednesday 1 April 2020

As I write this it is a cloudless, still day in Wellington. We’re a week into nationwide lockdown and our world feels a little as if it is falling apart, despite all our valiant efforts to keep it together. I’m spending too much time on social media, being jealous of people who seem to have nothing to do and resenting the pressure to suddenly create great works of genius when all I want to do is hide under the duvet.

Two weeks ago, as I stood in Photospace gallery contemplating this exhibition, people around the country were preparing to hunker down, stay home and keep their loved ones close. Falling Shadows coincidentally is an exhibition about loved ones, about connecting to other people and keeping them close, and about how we do that through photography. A collaborative exhibition between photographers Christine McFetridge, Virginia Woods-Jack and poet Airini Beautrais, Falling Shadows folds time onto itself, the past colliding with the present moment. It reminds us that we have been here before, and we will be here again.

Virginia Woods-Jack’s work reaches backwards to two different periods in time. For a number of years Woods-Jack has been documenting her now-teenage daughters as they grow. Rather than a straight documentary project Even as you watch I am fleeting is a skilled photographer’s response to her own feelings about her daughter’s journey through life. In Falling Shadows Woods-Jack has combined these images with photographs she took in her own youth. We see her siblings and surroundings as a young woman in photographs that are blurry and indistinct, fleeting glimpses of her world. In combining these two series of photographs Virginia compresses time as though it is circular and cyclical rather than linear. She makes time and photography work much more like a memory. We can move backwards and forwards pausing on any place, any time we want to recollect. She triggers memories of my own - I think of my teenage years, my own interaction with cameras as a way to understand my world. This is heightened by a table in the centre of the room containing negatives, old 6x4 prints and minilab envelopes with advice for amateur photographers. This is a double memory for me. I remember a time when this was our only interaction with photography; if we wanted a photo we had to wait for it. We gave unexposed film to somebody else and we waited for them to make the photograph that we would cherish for years to come. We made mistakes and learned slowly, if at all, not to repeat them. But I also remember a time when I was the person who the film was given to, working in photographic labs I processed and printed other people‘s memories. I remember watching photos just like these zip out of a machine one after another making neat piles that I would package in envelopes and give to each person as they came to collect their precious objects.

Woods-Jack also has two images hanging in the centre of the room. Two long drops of fabric tumble from a beam, on each a single photo is printed. Both are about water, one depicts a trail traced through condensation, the other is somebody holding a piece of ice. Water is a conduit, a vital part of our lives. Our body is made up of it, we consume it every day and are drawn to it. It is also a powerful metaphor: water flows, it is cyclical in nature. It runs through the land into the sea where it is drawn up into the sky only to fall again on the land. It is a physical embodiment of memory. Printed on fabric the images undulate. They move. They live. Just as memory is alive in the photographs.

On the other side of the room Christine McFetridge’s work reaches to a different generation. Her own photographic work interacts with photographs created and spaces inhabited by her grandfather. Christine‘s work reaches backwards to her own childhood memories. We see the places of her grandfather and images of her grandmother there now. We also see photographs made by her grandfather himself alongside lumen print photograms made by McFetridge from flowers collected from his garden. There are differences in the style of the imagery, her grandfather‘s photographs resemble snapshots despite how carefully they may have been taken. They are printed 6x4”, there is flash, there are light leaks, there is strange cropping, all symptoms of small point-and-shoot 35 mm cameras. They link to Woods-Jack’s snapshots from the time in her life before she became a skilled photographer. McFetridge’s photographs meanwhile are beautifully composed. Shot on medium format film, they are quiet meditations on their subject matter. Mixed together these different instances of photography form a layered experience of the memory of a person.

The lumen print photograms are different again and provide a tactility to the work. We see where the flowers have laid directly on the paper and one of the pieces of paper is torn, it looks as though it is had a bite taken out of it and there are cat hairs protruding from the edge. At the back of the gallery next to the window there is a lumen print in process. Flowers are compressed under glass atop photographic paper, which over the weeks of the exhibition slowly turns from pink to purple. Those of us visiting the exhibition will not see the results of this action because it is hidden from us by the flowers themselves. Perhaps this is a metaphor for all photography: that we cannot really see what is right in front of us. Perhaps we need the perspective of time to have any understanding of what we have photographed at all. Or perhaps I am feeling particularly maudlin because of the current situation. Whatever the answer, this is an exhibition that engages with photography’s mimetic value in sophisticated ways. Meanings are layered and played with, they are examined from different angles and we are asked questions about what we remember while the artists simultaneously pose questions about their own memory.

What I don’t get in this exhibition is any attempt to ask if anything in these images is true - it is a pointless question. Memories are neither truth nor false they are simply what they are. They shift, they change, they layer upon each other over time. Airini Beautrais’ accompanying poem understands this, it is a list of moments taken from life, moments that have burned into the poet’s brain in the same way that photographic moments burned into the photographer’s. We all have our mediums but perhaps in the end we are all trying to do the same thing - hold onto the fleeting moments.

Perhaps at this time more than ever what art can do is remind us how we are connected to each other. This exhibition is steeped in connection, between generations, between artists, between objects and people.

Perhaps in this time of social and physical distancing a reminder of our social connection is just what we need. Perhaps photography, always complicated in its relationship to time, memory and place is once again the medium for these times. Perhaps. I think of that lumen print, still being exposed day after day with no one to see it, recording the arc of the sun as it lowers in the sky.(1) I would like to be there when it is revealed, it has inadvertently recorded an extraordinary moment in history pressed down into it as the current situation presses down into us.

I will finish with some edited advice from Woods-Jack’s old minilab envelope, which seems particularly apt right now: “Make the best use of sun or available light... Keep at least six feet away from the subject to avoid pale, washed out effects... always remember to leave a border around the important subject matter... Keep fingers, straps and camera cases away from the lens.”

*

Outwith

by Airini Beautrais

If a girl walks into a lake                                 and no one is watching

is she still swimming?                     if a girl gathers flowers

and no one is watching                                  do the flowers pick themselves?

+

If a girl collects shells                       and holds them in her hands, unseen

are their former inhabitants                        still dead?

+

if a woman touches herself         and no one is thinking of her

does she still feel it                         she pushes up through the earth          

like a tuber                         sending out shoots

 +

The river swallows           another swimmer

spits out coins   nails       hex keys              broken glass

+

Clouds so bright                                they burn holes in your retinas

The wind insidious           in the disused chimney

+                                                   

I keep on bleeding          though no one else is born       

I place stones in a circle                 I burn twigs      

I draw down the stars                    from between the streetlights

+

I make a dark pond         in the darkest corner

It fills with leaves             I leave it like that

+

I strew my drive                               with dead grass

The wind bangs spoons                 in the camellias

+

I turn into a bird                and light down on a roof

My fingers claw the air                  like trees

+

Shadows fall                       from the hair

A mountain of melted snow

+

If a woman walks through a park at night

And no one follows her                 is she still alone?

+

I turn into a cat                  and jump through a hole

I grow scales                      and swim away

*

Caroline McQuarrie is an interdisciplinary artist whose primary interest is the concept of home, whether located in domestic space, community or the land we identify with. She works with photography and craft practices to explore meaning carried in objects and domestic, suburban or community sites. Exploring the role of the feminine in everyday life, and investigating the capacity for the act of making to create agency in women’s lives, McQuarrie is concerned with how memory and sentiment is manifested in photographic and/or hand crafted objects. Caroline is a Senior Lecturer in Photography, Whiti o Rehua School of Art, Massey University, Wellington.

British born Virginia Woods-Jack has lived in Wellington for the last 16 years creating bodies of work where notions of time, place, memory, our personal relationship to nature and how we experience the photographic image are recurring themes. Woods-Jack is an avid fan of the photobook and has self-published 4 handmade books to date with with 2 more publications being released in 2020. She is also the founder of Women in Photography NZ and AU.

Christine McFetridge is a photographer and writer represented by M.33, Melbourne. She is currently an MFA by Research candidate at RMIT University and a founding member of Women in Photography NZ & AU.

Airini Beautrais is a writer and teacher based in Whanganui. She writes poetry, short fiction, essays and criticism. Her work has appeared in a range of journals and anthologies in NZ and elsewhere. Her first book ‘Secret Heart’ was named Best First Book of Poetry in the Montana New Zealand Book Awards 2007; it was followed by ‘Western Line’ (2001), ‘Dear Neil Roberts’ (2013) and ‘Flow: Whanganui River Poems’ (2017).

Footnote

1. The exhibition closed earlier than the scheduled date of 25 April because of the Covid-19 lockdown.