Jane Zusters and Lockdown - reviewed
Jane Zusters: Te Karoro Karoro: A Place Called Home: The Red Zone Clearances: Christchurch/Ōtautahi
Pah Homestead
14 April – 30 May 2021
Various Artists: Lockdown - Auckland Photo Blog
Queens Wharf fence
28 May – 31 July 2021
Part of the Auckland Festival of Photography
Reviewed by Nina Seja for PhotoForum, 26 June 2021
Bridget Hackshaw, Passing time, from Lockdown
Emergencies by their nature allow us to reorient ourselves – for the most part, unwillingly. At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an evocative short film called Letter from a Virus was released.(1) The virus is a teacher, the Sans Soleil-like voiceover incants. She asks us to quieten – “It is hard to listen when you are so busy all the time, hustling to uphold the comforts and conveniences that scaffold your lives. But the foundation is giving way.” The film’s persistent request stays with me as I look at both Te Karoro Karoro and Lockdown. Each evokes a space for listening.
Jane Zusters, Te Karoro Karoro – where one was home, 2011 – 2016
The two shows offer new methods of looking at what have been perceived as traumatic events. They raise questions about how humans cope when their lives are upended. Jane Zusters’ meditation on Christchurch after the earthquakes is one. The other – Lockdown, a curated gathering of images taken in New Zealand during that life-altering event that is the pandemic.(2) Taken together, we can see a diversity of sense-making activities following one’s world becoming no longer what it was. Taken separately, we’re shown a microcosm of human responses to radical change.
Jane Zusters, Te Karoro Karoro – where one was home, 2011 – 2016
Zusters’ title is in itself an incantation – a slow, methodical tethering to place: Te Karoro Karoro: A Place Called Home: The Red Zone Clearances: Christchurch/Ōtautahi. “Home” is a place we ground ourselves, but what happens when the ground itself shifts sideways? Zusters shows the fragments of human existence that are echoes of a former life. Te Karoro Karoro/South Shore is a former suburb due to the Christchurch earthquakes resulting in it being part of the red zone clearances. The New Zealand Government took possession of 7041 properties with the aim of clearing the land by April 2016. The landscape is a wetland, an estuary, a “wild paradise” of Zusters’ childhood, which in itself was repurposed through human habitation.
(Images: Jane Zusters, Te Karoro Karoro – where one was home, 2011 – 2016)
The photographs depict the ways in which we take root into place, creating illusions of solidity: a bedroom to rest in; a living room with carefully thought-out lines. Leisure activities, too, are highlighted, with a single small boat resting on a bank. But these are only reverberations from a former life. The bedroom’s walls have collapsed and the tone of the work is one of destruction, an emptying of human life, and the renewal of nature, inflected by the remnants of human life.
There’s an anthropological approach to this witnessing. It’s appropriate that Zusters is doing this documentation, given that she has a long-established relationship with the area from her early years. While one would expect sentimentality due to this, there is, instead, a thoughtful gaze, and one imbued with the responsibility of an observer who is profoundly aware of the necessity of a record. The final photograph is of Zusters, camera held steady on a windowsill, pointed directly at the viewer.
Lockdown, May 2021 (Image courtesy of the Auckland Festival of Photography)
This self-reflexivity is also prominent in Lockdown, an Auckland Festival of Photography exhibition, drawn from the Auckland Photo Blog, a shared digital space that enabled Aucklanders to submit photographs during the pandemic lockdown. The archive consists of 10,000 photographs taken by Aucklanders of their city. The pandemic component of the blog highlights the private experiences in a public form – establishing, as the show announces, “a sense of camaraderie making lockdown more of a shared time, alone together.” Both shows bring the private, the intimate, into public space.
Lockdown created – and nurtured – a sense of exploration and performativity, as people turned the lens (photographic, Zoom, social media) upon themselves as a reprieve (see, for example, Kim Lu’s Silent Echo (3) from the pandemic’s monotony and unknowability. Perhaps seeing ourselves through this practice provided a sense of reassurance.
Tiago Lamy Silva, Home Alone
The images in Lockdown are diverse, from the spirited to the sombre, and span the natural environment to the industrial. The series engages with how Aucklanders interacted with the landscape around them and with each other. Through all of them runs a theme of quiet contemplation and of seeing the world anew. The congested Auckland streets are instead emptied as if by an apocalypse, and Bridget Hackshaw’s lone skateboarder takes a moment against a placid, watery backdrop. The signs of life are not large gestures but the spaces between them, witnessed particularly in the relationships between the photographers and their subjects. Tiago Lamy Silva’s powerful photograph is of a woman in a foetal position on a couch. Her expression is one of crackling intensity, possibly mid-argument or that lockdown frustration experienced by many. It’s also an important reminder of how lockdown functioned, for some, as constraints for those in unsteady relationships, making acute all those tremors that the noise of regular life could drown out.
As the pandemic settled around us, we learned new techniques of being and doing in our everyday activities. As in Zusters’ show, Lockdown will, as time passes, become a vital record of a transformational period in time. It’s critical to remember how photographic meaning can accrue over time. It’s difficult not to read Rajeev Nedumaran’s wonderful barbershop photograph, with his reflection immersed in a colorful cacophony of the store’s blues and reds, as one of longing. As lockdown ticked by with its unending horizon, our desires accumulated – for each other, to be touched, and for our tresses to be trimmed. Craig Rogers’ photograph – saturated with the colors of dawn and the bright fluorescent of the Customs agent vest– is insistent in its celebration of essential workers.
An important element of Lockdown is its democratic potential, both in the blog’s submissions from a vast scope of participants, and also in its outing in the public, highly trafficked harbour zone. Indeed, each show uses space in a novel manner, which underscores the physical transformations in these crisis moments. In Te Karoro Karoro, the photographs are visually “stacked” upon each other, five high and three wide, and reach high to the ceiling so that one feels as if a towering series of a wrecked place overwhelms them. In Lockdown, the photographs stretch the length of an immense fence, outside, exposed to the elements on Queens Wharf on the Auckland Harbour. The inside/outside qualities of lockdown were notable, as we were confined to our domestic spaces with bursts of acceptable excursions outside. In the two exhibitions, these expansive feelings take shape in physical forms.
Both Lockdown and Te Karoro Karoro should be commended for their commitment to documenting social change. By doing so, we can learn of how nature shapes us, and produces new ways of looking and listening.
Nina Seja is a writer and researcher based in Auckland.
Footnotes
(1) Sustainable Human, A Letter from the Virus: #LISTEN, 2020. https://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/a-letter-from-the-virus-listen/?fbclid=IwAR1gdrL50Yb7N0z1NWP80Dk19722f-0aJTEfEL5RTK-Vea822e2crZ0vlkg.
(2) For the full body of photographs submitted, see https://www.photographyfestival.org.nz/photo-blog/index.cfm?start_pos=1&dir=/content/photo-blog/2020/03-Lockdown.
(3) See my essay on Kim Lu’s work, “We Think Differently: Lockdown, Memories, and Kim Lu’s Silent Echo,” at https://www.photoforum-nz.org/blog/2020/10/17/kim-lu-featured-portfolio.