Divination - Performance Photographs 1978-82
Divination - Performance Photographs 1978-82
John Lethbridge
Webb’s Wellington
23 Marion St, Te Aro, Wellington
30 March – 23 April 2022
John Lethbridge, Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival: Waterwell, 1978. With performer Jane Campion
Wellington-born artist John Lethbridge started out as a printmaker. He went on to study under Jim Allen at Elam in Auckland in the early 1970s, joining the post-object-art set. (His 1975 solo show Formal Enema Enigma was part of Auckland City Art Gallery’s Project Programme.) Lethbridge moved to Australia at the beginning of 1976 and bought a Hasselblad camera.
The iconic staged photographs he made in the late 1970s and early 1980s have one foot in the literalism of performance documentation and another in the glitz of fashion photography. Equal parts Joseph Beuys and Helmut Newton, they scrambled genuine psycho-spiritual enquiry with camp theatrics, and epitomised the postmodern turn. Many of the photos feature performer–assistant Jane Campion. Lethbridge’s 1978 series Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival was shot at her family farm at Peka Peka. John Lethbridge: Divination has been curated by Robert Leonard.
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