The Simple Image
The Simple Image
Barry Clothier
The National Library
Te Puna Foundation Gallery
Corner Molesworth & Aitken St, Wellington
9 April to 10 July 2021
Detail from publicity shots of the band Simple Image, by Barry Clothier, May 1967. Ref: PAColl-7031-1-53. Alexander Turnbull Library.
In the 1960s, Wellington jazz musician and photographer Barry Clothier was ‘photographer to the stars’, and anyone who was anyone in the local pop scene commissioned a photoshoot with him.
Drawn from Barry Clothier’s personal archives held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, The Simple Image features rarely seen photos of Kiwi icons, including Bruno Lawrence, Maria Dallas, Dinah Lee, The Chicks, and many others.
The Fourmyula goofing off Lewis Carroll-style to promote their 'Alice is There' single, September 1968. From left: Wayne Mason, Ali Richardson, Martin Hope, Carl Evensen, Chris Parry. - Barry Clothier, from a contact sheet, PAColl-7031-2-44, Alexander Turnbull Library
John B Turner of PhotoForum writes: Barry and I met at the Upper Hutt Camera Club in 1963 and bonded as probably the two youngest members there. He was working as a NZ Post Office linesman then, but clearly had an artistic sensibility. His wife Judy was a primary school teacher, then, I think, and after a while they introduced me to their friend Wendy Goldfinch, who had also trained at Teachers College. Consequently, Wendy and I married in 1964 and our children and Adele, Barry and Judy’s daughter, also spent a lot of enjoyable time together. Although I never got to meet Geoff Murphy or Bruno Lawrence among their artist friends, Barry introduced me to the jazz music of the greats such as Miles Davis etc. We enjoyed each other’s company and Barry and I sometimes went out photographing together
Like mine, Barry’s photography was exploratory – trying to understand why the photographs we admired touched us at a deeper level than others. We wanted our photographs to stand out from the crowd during the process of finding ourselves, so we were all over the place in terms of choosing our subject matter and trying different ways of presenting our ideas. That can clearly be seen from the installation photographs I took of our joint exhibition at Artides Gallery, Wellington, in June 1965. The exhibition came about when Barry, who knew the Artides director, whose name I can’t recall right now, asked about us having a joint show at his ceramics gallery, and reflects the multiple influences and potential directions we could take with our own photography, from the prevalent old-fashioned neo-Pictorialism of the camera clubs to the latest and more challenging work seen in the major photography and mass media magazines from overseas.
Barry, I think, was more influenced and admiring of fashion and lively editorial photography, while I was, perhaps more interested in documentary values and the too-often ignored aspects of everyday life. Barry wanted to work as a photographer so it was not such a surprise when he became a professional commercial photographer in Wellington, making competent pictures for others. His “artistic” girly pictures, I thought, were run of the mill, and not art in my view. He had become, I thought, just another enthusiastic photographer unable to get above the demands of running a business. But to be fair, we had been out of touch since I moved to Auckland in 1971, so I have not seen much of his commercial work, nor personal work.
For me, our joint exhibition taught me two major lessons: that the value of making exhibitions involves seeing one’s intentions and outcomes in a cold hard light for the first time. And that this critical, self-revelatory experience is far more important than any private back patting or public praise.
Extracted from HMV in the 1960s: the Barry Clothier collection by Chris Bourke on the AudioCulture website