Hidden in Plain Sight

John Pennington

4-27 Feb 2021

and

Windscreen Washers 2012-2018

Mary Hutchinson

29 Jan – 27 Feb 2021

Photospace Gallery, Wellington

Reviewed by Connie Brown for PhotoForum, March 2021

To pick at the threads that weave together John Pennington and Mary Hutchinson’s photographs, exhibited concurrently at Pōneke’s Photospace gallery, one might pull out the documentary tradition that both work within as being the most robust. But to leave it at this would be a broad stroke, a clumsy slip with the quick-unpick. The thread of documentary photography is itself fibrous and tangled, and is one to be taken between index finger and thumb, rolled about until its strands come loose, compulsively peeled apart and lain out, evenly spaced across the table like tally marks. Now dissected, now placed in soldierly formation, things are easier to see and certain strands attract my attention over and again as I think about the works exhibited: the relationship between photographer and subject, between person and document, between people and place, between photograph and city, and the ethics of all these ‘betweens’, all of which, I think now, might actually make more sense entangled.

They also might make more sense through the photographer’s lens. In the portraits that serve as the centre-piece of Pennington’s Hidden in Plain Sight, (a study of Naenae), the first of these strands – the artist-subject encounter – is at the images’ fore, or suspended somewhere in the six-foot-ish space between photographer and photographed.

(All images from John Pennington’s Hidden in Plain Sight)

Pennington’s portraiture feels deliberately gentle and earnest, committed to engaging his subject in the making of the image and the process of representation, a key part which was the gifting of a print to his subjects after the encounter. Most look back at the camera, and the few who don’t do so with indifference, or maybe just to avoid the glare of the sun.

Several Aotearoa-based photographers have worked in a similar manner, or with similar motives prior to Pennington: David Cook’s New Urban Forests, and Edith Amituanai’s Edith’s Talent Agency, come most readily to mind. Formally, Pennington’s works are most reminiscent of Cook’s, but the latter’s subjects look shinier, as if standing atop of their environments like figures on billboards, a fitting effect seeing as each is a visitor to The Base, Hamilton’s super-sized shopping complex. Pennington’s portraits belong to a communal space, however, and not a commercial one, like Cook’s. In this way, Amituanai’s project is perhaps a better precedent, but almost an unfair one, those images being so joy-filled, and Amituanai’s earnestness not even a question. She loves the community she photographs, whereas Pennington seems to simply find his interesting. Both positions, however, allow us to think about the dynamics of encounter, a dynamic sufficiently complex to warrant any position that invites us to think.

One image in the exhibition offers this invitation with a particularly firm hand: it shows a woman, her expression playful yet focussed, her shoulders square, her hands lifted and gripping a red notebook and pen as if she is making her own record of the encounter. That notebook, its contents unknown and unknowable, marks the private world of the photographed subject that always remains out of reach to the viewer, that space which remains – stubbornly, sacredly, – undocumentable.

His subject’s autonomy and individuality seem, in these ways, to be important to Pennington, but it would be a mistake to view the images as character studies. The prints are all untitled, for one, and mosaicked across the wall in three long rows, with some spaces left empty as if still to be filled, like a memory game played with cards where the objective is to find pairs. That is emphatically not the objective here; it seems instead a strategy to highlight the lack of an obvious relationship between these faces, pointing to the heterogeneity of Naenae where these encounters took place. The Hutt Valley suburb is the actual subject of this project, its history, its culture, its social and physical architecture, all told obliquely, through the faces and activities of its residents.

There are many ways that these things could have been surveyed and photographically rendered. An archival approach seems one obvious method, and Eugène Atget, arguably the first proponent of the city portrait, did so through entirely opposite means, by emptying Paris’ streets. Why then, choose to look at Naenae only from a contemporary perspective, through which the artist himself admits it “might seem like just another ordinary working-class suburb”?[1}

Teju Cole wrote that “Places are the fossils of events,” [2] inviting us to see places as the firm thing that becomes of the fleeting, but only of its firmest parts. Soft tissue is still apt to rot away. With his camera trained firmly on contemporary life in Naenae, Pennington has attempted to represent the whole, live organism, its soft tissue intact. He wants to represent the complete, live place, it’s ‘life’ being the apparently negligible and routine interactions that animate its streets: a friendly run-in outside the dairy, the football match on the basketball court, the family picnic outside the dollar store. In these moments, Pennington finds traces of “the desire to emerge into a different kind of world” that gave rise to Naenae to be still present and pulsing. [3] The work may not give its viewer a strong or specific sense of what these desires were, though the catalogue tells us that they included “the English garden city movement,” “cooperative politics,” and “the modernist designs of the Austrian architect Ernst Plischke.” Soft tissue intact, it is the bones and other hard bits of Naenae’s history that are obscured. But those bits aren’t at risk of rot, and what Pennington’s project leaves us with instead is the sense that the identity of any place is never static, that its history and future are manifold and unfolding, that it is always in the process of (re-)documenting itself, whether through the camera’s lens or in the red notebooks of its residents.

Mary Hutchinson’s work, Windscreen Washers 2012-2018 likewise celebrates encounter and camaraderie within a community, but here, as I roll it between my finger and thumb, the documentary thread feels yet more fibrous and gets yet more tangled.

The artist writes, "I am interested in people who are sometimes regarded as being on the fringes of our communities,” an interest which she turns in this series to the roadside window washers of Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington. [4] What does it mean to document a group of people who never seem to have the right documents, or who are perpetually written up with the wrong ones, a group of people somehow both under and over-documented in their ad-hoc, unauthorised enterprise? Can photography restore something that other, official processes of documentation strip away?

Unlike Pennington whose portraits were consistent in composition, and all quite composed at that, Hutchinson’s view alternates between the announced and the discreet. In some, her subjects pose, squeegees and Powerade bottles held aloft; in others, they are caught in private moments together or alone, one hugging a puppy to his chest as he squats against the wall. Hutchinson’s alternating views are effective in disrupting the singular one from which Wellington’s window washers are typically seen: briefly and suspiciously through the windscreen while waiting for the lights to change. Her’s is, like Pennington’s, an earnest approach.

The choice to shoot in black-and-white, however, unsettles this earnestness. With the exception of a quartet of images shot through windscreen and soapsuds, near-abstractions which benefit from the high-contrast of greyscale, and perhaps too where the photographs are reproduced in zine format alongside the exhibition, the gesture classicises the subjects at the expense of their lived-reality. As they are, the images recall a famous precedent in city-labour imagery, Lewis Hine’s depictions of the construction of the Empire State Building. Though this parallel underscores the changed meaning of ‘precarious work’, Hutchinson’s images lack the emotional, physical and perspectival extremity that made Hine’s classical references potent. Colour may have grounded the images, and may have given them, as documents, that crucial sense of aliveness that stands counter to ‘the official’, that crucial sense of the manifold and unfolding.

Turning back to all the strands spread out before me, all I can really conclude is that the best threads are those that are fibrous and tangled. Documentary photography is one of the trickiest to navigate, where the politics of representation and encounter are most pronounced and delicate. It is a privilege to see two local photographers seizing camera-as-compass, and a privilege to think through these issues, to feel their texture, weight, and unending lengths as they pass through my hands.

Connie Brown is a freelance writer based in Tāmaki Makaurau where she is currently completing postgraduate studies in Art History.

Footnotes
[1] Pennington, John. (2021). Hidden in Plain Sight. Wellington: Photospace Gallery.

[2] Cole, Teju. (2013, Jan 18). Wicked Pictures. The New Inquiry. https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/wicked-pictures/

[3] Pennington.

[4] Hutchinson, Mary. (2021). Windowscreen Washers 2012 – 2018. Wellington: Photospace Gallery.