Spend a Night Not a Fortune

Riley Claxton

Featured Portfolio

Essay by Peter Simpson for PhotoForum, 23 September 2020

Rotorua and the thermal regions of the central North Island have been something of a Mecca for photographers since the early days of the medium, the establishment of Aotearoa New Zealand as a post-colonial nation being almost co-terminous with the invention of photography. Colonial photographers such as John Kinder, Daniel Mundy, Alfred Burton, Josiah Martin and George Valentine were drawn to the region in the latter decades of the nineteenth century both for its unique geothermal phenomena and for the relative accessibility there of Māori life to Pākehā visitors. This fascination continued in the twentieth century with photographers such as Theo Schoon and Peter Peryer among others.

Riley Claxton who lives in Rotorua is a photographer whose work shows an alert consciousness of the geographical and cultural complexities of the area and also of its photographic history; his portfolio of twenty images, Spend a Night Not a Fortune, provides a sharp contemporary perspective on Rotorua a century-and-a-half after it first came under the scrutiny of the lens.

A graduate of the University of Canterbury and the Whitecliffe College of Art and Design (Master of Fine Arts, 2015), Claxton is a lecturer at Toi-Ohomai Institute of Technology in Rotorua, specialising in photography and graphic design. He has exhibited, mainly in group shows, in Rotorua, Tauranga, Auckland and elsewhere since around 2012. The present portfolio is a product of the last five years or so.

(All images: Riley Claxton, from Spend a night not a Fortune)

Claxton’s Rotorua is a place of contrasts and conflicts, of jarring, amusing or poignant juxtapositions, of nature and culture in clashing concatenation, of Māori and Pākehā culture in close if not always entirely comfortable proximity, of raw nature and rank commercialism side-by-side. In his own words, ‘Rotorua is an odd place to live; steam and sulphur vents from the ground and lurking, bubbling and erupting just beyond the façade of the suburbs is a sublime geothermal landscape. A gateway to another world…’

The first half-dozen images in the portfolio introduce the viewer to many of the elements and combinations which characterise the sequence. In the first, a woven rectangle of flax obviously Māori in design and manufacture is pinned to the wall in a room of uncertain purpose; it could be a hotel room or an office, no clues are given except that the cultural object appears to have a decorative not a functional purpose. The design on the textile is strikingly geometrical – a band of dark-stained chequer-board shapes between double horizontal lines (a thicker outer line and a thinner inner line), contrasting with the regular vertical pattern of the flax strips. The skirt – if that’s what it is – is hung on the wall like (and as) an art work. The decided geometrical pattern of the garment is replicated in the vertical panels of the wall (tongue-in-groove boards?) and the plain horizontal structure of the dull red-coloured upholstered bench which extends from edge to edge of the picture. The impression is of a harmonious relationship between the room and the wall-piece. If there is a comment implied here about two cultures relating to each other the relationship seems benign, compatible, reciprocal. Or could there also be a sly comment about the commodification of Māori cultural items for aesthetic and commercial purposes? Is the photograph formal and neutral, or culturally ambivalent?

The second image, from which the portfolio derives its catchy title, is more pointed, more obviously instinct with attitude. The ersatz architecture of the Rose Court Motel with its gable windows references some other time and place, its cottage garden spotlit to highlight the titular roses is ablaze with pinkish light, lit up like a Christmas tree; its gaudy signage in clashing fonts and colours shrieks its tacky commercial message into the surrounding night. This is the culturally deaf and blind aspect of New Zealand tourism which Ian Wedde skewered so devastatingly in his 2006 novel The Viewing Platform.

The third image contrasts this scene of cultural carnage with the majestic and unadulterated sublime of the thermal landscape, the grey cliffs and terraces pouring with caramel-coloured streams and pools. The colours are extraordinary; nature ‘making it strange’ (ostranenie) before our very eyes; we could be on another planet.

Next in the sequence comes the tower of the Elizabethan-style Rotorua Bathhouse (now housing Rotorua Museum) erupting in unlikely fashion from dun-coloured native bush. Its appearance is both identifying (the city’s most famous building) and defamiliarising (the unusual perspective) at the same time. This unique building is a reminder that tourism in Rotorua is no recent phenomenon but began more than a century ago with the construction of this spa to attract and service international travelers. In its own way the Bathhouse is no more native than the Rose Court Motel though given a certain respectability by the patina of age.

This sunny day-time scene (the usual currency of tourist photography but rare in this portfolio), is followed by the image of a vast plume of white steam – a geyser presumably (or is it smoke?) – pouring into the night sky, another instance of the familiar image defamiliarised. Claxton often seems to photograph at night, the surrounding darkness adding an element of mystery, of Gothic strangeness, to the sublimity of nature’s forces.

Few human figures appear in this portfolio. There are plenty of signs of the human in buildings, vehicles, artifacts, furniture, playground creatures and the like, but few actual people (as distinct from carved figures) apart from this solitary person in the sixth image clad in a pale yellow raincoat and rendered almost hump-backed by the enclosing backpack- covering garment, peering from a boardwalk into the steaming cauldron of some rain-swamped geothermal setting. It is a compelling and beautifully constructed photograph.

One function of figures in a photograph is to provide scale; without figures (or other measurable markers) scale is rendered ambiguous. Among the remaining fourteen images several exploit scalar ambiguity, one of several features of Claxton’s works in which he is sometimes reminiscent of Peter Peryer. This is the case with several other studies of the geothermal landscape, each depicting the sulphur-stained craggy deposits created by the mineral-laden extrusions from the earth’s crust, but in a manner which disorients the viewer’s eye by withholding signs of scale. One image could be the surface of the moon viewed from space, or a relatively small feature viewed from close-range. Although this is the territory mined so effectively by Schoon, Claxton largely avoids the mud-pools so fascinating to Schoon’s modernist eye for less formal and more suggestively atmospheric effects.

Buildings photographed at night are another recurrent theme. Darkness and artificial lighting add an edge of magic and mystery to otherwise commonplace scenes of a vehicle in a car-port (colour-coded with its setting), or plastic outdoor furniture by a pool. Quirky signage and ironic juxtapositions serve to enliven commonplace buildings or museum displays. A few of these images (e.g. the Māori paddler next to a speed-sign) seem more like tricks borrowed, whether consciously or not, from others (in this case, Laurence Aberhart) than wholly original.

Claxton shares something of Peryer’s gift for recognizing an object or scene that might seem ordinary in itself but which may take on an aura of enigma and magic when photographed. Examples of this ability are the freaky dinosaur-like creature in a child’s playground which might well have crawled out of one of these weird landscapes, or the three majestic exotics with elevated root systems, or the carved Māori figure viewed from behind flanked by lancewoods confronting a dead-ordinary brick and tile dwelling. Claxton exploits the same unexpected from-behind perspective in this last image as one of Peryer’s Waitangi photographs, though whether unconsciously or in ironic allusion to the older photographer I don’t know.

Riley Claxton has found a lot to say about his home-town in this lively and intelligent portfolio. I would be happy to see more images drawn from this deep well.

Peter Simpson is a writer, editor and occasional curator who lives in Auckland and has published books on Ronald Hugh Morrieson, Allen Curnow, Colin McCahon, Leo Bensemann, Peter Peryer and Charles Brasch. He received the Prime Minister's Award for Literary Achievement in Non Fiction in 2017.

This review was supported by funding from Creative New Zealand.