PhotoForum #82: Pictures They Want to Make: Recent Auckland Photography

by Chris Corson-Scott and Edward Hanfling with a foreword by Ron Brownson.

Featuring photographs by Mark Adams, Edith Amituanai, Fiona Amundsen, Harvey Benge, Bruce Connew, Chris Corson-Scott, Ngahuia Harrison, Derek Henderson, Ian Macdonald, Haruhiko Sameshima, Geoffrey H. Short, and Talia Smith.

Published by PhotoForum, 2013 to accompany the exhibition Recent Auckland Photography at Northart, 19 May - 12 June 2013.

Designated as PhotoForum #82

Cover photograph by Edith Amituanai

ISBN 978-0-9597818-6-1.

270 x 295mm, 176 pages, with over 100 full colour reproductions, Hardback.

Showcasing a selection of significant photographs from twelve artists with various connections to the Auckland region.

Interview with Chris Corson-Scott by Adrian Hatwell for D-Photo, 15 May 2013

“The book itself, containing the work of 12 photographers and more than 100 photographs mostly drawn from longer photo-essays, is an energetic, imaginative production, a splashy publication on an Auckland scale without being unwieldy.”

“In their Introduction, the editors suggest that their selected artists have ‘varying degrees of commitment to notions of “the real”. Ian Macdonald is one who flouts attempts to nail down the real, preferring artifice. He collages digital photographs to create rainforest facades. Here, the New Zealand landscape is presented as an ecological niche, pristine and primal, and through the lush foliage the primeval light beckons. He makes images that are green altars, monumental and hopeful.

Geoffrey H. Short is the anarchist of the bunch, a singular poet, exploding expectations with exhilarating photographs of controlled explosions at Bethells Beach Te Henga. These spectacular bomb-bursts, as the essay on him tells us, are a metaphor for the act of photography itself.”

Review by David Eggleton
Art New Zealand
147/Spring 2013 issue
(pgs 93-95)

Other reviews:

Georgina McWhirter for Landfall Online

Zara Sigglekow for EyeContact (exhibition)

James Gilberd for Photospace

Adrian Hatwell for D-Photo

Art News New Zealand:
Pictures They Want to Make: Recent Auckland Photography by Chris Corson-Scott and Edward Hanfling

Before those readers south of the Bombay Hills skip this review, stop and listen. Yes, most of the photographers featured live in Auckland, but not all – Mark Adams and Derek Henderson live elsewhere. And the book isn’t filled with images of the Sky Tower and One Tree Hill, though Geoffrey H Short does have a preoccupation with Kingsland’s Kiwi Bacon Factory.

Published by the non-profit organisation Photoforum, launched at Northart in Northcote for the Auckland Festival of Photography, and co-authored by eminent writer Edward Hanfling and photographer Chris Corson-Scott, this book is a timely celebration of the strength of New Zealand photography.

Though some of the photographers included (Henderson, Adams, Benge, Connew and Sameshima) have regularly published their work, others haven’t and so this book fills a yawning gap in New Zealand art photography publishing.

It’s an appealing cocktail of images, including Mark Adams’ mesmeric land and seascapes, Edith Amituanai’s candidly-shot suburbia, Harvey Benge’s “strange pictures in cities”, Fiona Amundsen’s barren cityscapes; Corson-Scott’s suburban oases and blissful beaches, and Talia Smith’s portraits of modern-day threatening ‘triffids’ – pampas, privet and nasturtium.

A worthy addition to the library.

Source:
Art News New Zealand, Winter 2013 issue, pg 147.
www.artnews.co.nz
Our thanks to Art News New Zealand for permission to share the above article.