PhotoForum #100: Mirror City - Harry Culy

Co-published by Bad News Books and PhotoForum, and designated as PhotoForum #100
ISSN 0111-0411

Linen hardcover with tipped-in photo

Offset printed with 58 duotone plates
202 × 250 mm, 100 pages

Design by Sam Fraser and Harry Culy

ISBN 978-0-473-65859-5
September 2023
Edition of 500

PhotoForum is pleased to partner with Bad News Books and Harry Culy to bring members this superb publication as PhotoForum magazine’s one hundredth issue, in our 50th year since the foundation of PhotoForum Inc.

‘After spending much of my late teens and twenties living overseas, I came back to this place which represented home for me. On my return, I encountered an eerie feeling: ‘home’ felt strangely unfamiliar. This prompted a desire to explore this uncanny sense of simultaneous belonging and non-belonging, through photographing the next generation of young people living here, and the landscape they inhabit, as a way to picture what home might mean to me now.’ — Harry Culy

Mirror City is a deeply personal and lyrical exploration of Harry Culy’s hometown, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Made between 2018-2022, the photographs in this book wander through a nondescript urban landscape, recording scenes that oscillate between the mysterious and mundane. Enigmatic graffiti, tangled vines and wires, cracked glass, boarded-up doorways and portraits of the young people who live here: these moments are punctuated with private iPhone notes and observations, domestic reminders, and lists. Arranged in sequence, the photographs and text in this book form a dreamlike narrative that rejects any sort of definitive conclusion. It instead looks for patterns and rhythms that may echo the fragility of belonging, and the uncertain future facing us.