As a child, staring out the car window as my family travelled throughout the South Island, I listened to my father speak of the European surveyors that mapped New Zealand. I liked to imagine the landscape without the hallmarks of contemporary life, picturing what they would have seen as they navigated the bygone landscape. As we drove along the Coast Road, I thought of Charles Heaphy scrambling along the coastal bluffs and striding along empty beaches led by Maori guides. When we crossed Arthurs Pass, Arthur Dudley Dobson followed, clambering over boulders as icy water rushed past. My understanding of the ecological and topographical history of the land has improved since then, I now know which hills were created by glacial movement and what type of forest used to cover certain areas, but this is where my concern for the future of the land developed. My favourite part of this imagining was believing that the land could change back to the condition tangata whenua found it, when nature changed on its own time scale rather than the one colonisation imposed on it.
Photographing the Waimakariri River came about as a personal response to legislation the New Zealand government released in 2017 with targets for the quality of our rivers. It contained the goal that rivers should be wade-able, an ambiguous term that characterised a river in which the amounts of contaminants would be unlikely to cause harm to a human so long as they did not submerge themselves or ingest the water. Rather than aiming for cleaner rivers the targets change what the definition of a clean river was. The response from the public was not positive, for decades the ‘Kiwi summer’ has been typified by rope swings and cannonballs, fishing, camping, and jet boating, all along the waterways that crisscross the country. Lousy standards that were so loosely defined that they allowed our rivers to continue to degrade without clear targets or viable solutions caused outrage.
Issues with water quality largely stem from human interventions on the land surrounding the rivers, which are too numerous and varied to easily illustrate succinctly. For example, the aquifers underneath the Canterbury plains operate on an approximate 40-year cycle, meaning that the nutrients, nitrates, water, and other pollutants going onto the land now, will take at least 40 years to flow out again. This should be a huge concern to the residents of the region because they supply much of the drinking water in Canterbury. High levels of nitrates are particularly bad for human health and can cause a range of illnesses, especially in small children. (Radio New Zealand 2019) Unlike bacteria and other contaminants, nitrates cannot be removed from water and the only alternative will be to source drinking water from non-contaminated areas. The effect of the aquifers around Christchurch becoming polluted would be extensive, even within the city limits. In the unlikely event of the immediate withdrawal of humans and our infrastructure, I realised that it would take decades, even centuries for the land to return to a healthy state.
In 2018 I produced a photographic book titled, From the Muddy Banks, that contained approximately 60 images in a sequence based around the idea of walking and the comprehensive exploration of the Waimakariri River and surrounding lands. The final artist book was intended to be synonymous with all rivers as I wanted to kickstart a conversation about our relationship with the environment. However, there are reasons I chose the Waimakariri over other more iconic environmentally challenged Canterbury rivers, for example the nearby Selwyn.
I spent most of my childhood on the West Coast, with my extended family living in Christchurch and now being based here myself I have made numerous trips over Arthurs Pass and down the Old West Coast Road that I know it like the back of my hand. For much of the latter half of the journey, the Waimakariri runs alongside the highway visible via sneaked glances between shelterbelts or in sweeping panoramas from the passenger seat window. It’s through this association I felt most connected to the river, but I also felt it was an apt location to make work about because of its history as an environmental force to be reckoned with that has been largely tamed through many human interventions.
Through my photographic practice I began to research the landscape that we are shaping around us and how this effects the place the natural landscape occupies in contemporary life. In the past nature has been viewed as something to conquer or as an escape from the banalities of daily life. People climb mountains because they are there, burn forests to create arable land, seal away the most beautiful parts in national parks, and stop bank rivers like the Waimakariri to save us from the inconvenience of them flooding our cities.
To provide context to the sequence of images that made up From the Muddy Banks, I bookended them with two pieces of text; a brief introduction to my motivations behind making the work and a piece that detailed my personal experience of the river. Although it may seem obvious now due to my longstanding connection with the Waimakariri, this idea was very new to the work at the time. I hadn’t yet considered this aspect in relation to the body of work. I instead focussed on general human impact on the environment, which I felt was more important. It took me the best part of a year to realise that by consciously including myself in the work, I didn’t have to take a moral standpoint. I could use it as a more subtle way to talk about the anxiety for the future of the environment that I was feeling.
To add some background, due to an anxiety disorder I have the tendency to get overwhelmed by everyday tasks. Therefore, nothing is ever as simple as it should because of this the reductive nature of photography is one of its most attractive aspects to me. In both the act of photographing and in editing, visual information is intentionally reduced and simplified until it seems to make sense. At the river the world is already very simple; trees, gravel, grass, and water. It is easy to unwind by taking the time to wander and explore. I try not to take the most obvious path or walk in straight lines; I allow myself to be distracted by anything and everything that might be interesting. The act of looking through a viewfinder teaches me more about the landscape than any book ever could. Framed by the lens and reproduced in 2D, I am forced to draw relationships between details and to decide what is important to include. One infinitesimal moment can be captured in an image that is then able to be considered for an immeasurable amount of time. Photography feels less interpretive than painting but isn’t as fleeting or changeable as film. This deliberately slow moving or static form of documentary is the ideal way for me to communicate what I believe to be truths in a subtle and concise manner.
Figure 1 and 1.1. Traces of human engagement with the river.
In my images, rows of poplars and willows protect the stop banks, gravel hollows filled with new growth are evidence of quarrying, patches of strange plants show where, years ago someone dumped garden waste. The river itself is just water flowing to the sea via the path of least resistance. Slowly unpicking the ways that we have manipulated it, used it, and left our marks is what really interests me. This unpicking of the landscape provides clues to untold or overlooked narratives of the land. By looking only at the evidence left behind, clearer insight into how the Waimakariri River is valued and utilized is more discernible than could be found through theoretical research alone.
In the mid 1800’s Christchurch suffered devastating flooding that threatened the city’s existence as the Waimakariri spilled southward into the Avon after heavy rain in the headwaters. (Logan 1987) Extensive earthworks, cuttings, flood banks, and removal of gravel from the riverbed by civil engineers trying to tame the river continues to this day. Although Christchurch now seems safe from floods caused by the Waimakariri, it is pertinent to remember these past events as climate change causes ever more extreme weather events.
Figure 2. The Waimakariri River overflowing into the Avon and flooding Christchurch. (Logan 1987)
Climate change due to global warming is hotly contested in international media, (Feldman 2016) despite consensus from the scientific community that it is both real and that “there's a more than 95 percent probability that human activities over the past 50 years have warmed our planet.” (NASA 2019) In classrooms around the world, a popular experiment requiring an unused roll of toilet paper is used to demonstrate the geological time scale of the Earth to students. Events of significance are marked at intervals along the unrolled paper, which creates a visual representation of the Earth’s geological history. Examples of these events and their measurements include; 10,160cm from the beginning of the roll: when the Earth was formed, 1,546.09cm: when the first multicellular organisms appeared, 143.57cm: when the dinosaurs became extinct in the most well-known mass extinction, and 0.02cm: the beginnings of modern man and recorded history. (Wenner 2018) This timeline is divided into smaller chunks based on periods defined by events similar to those aforementioned, although usually of great geological significance, where changes on the Earth’s surface have resulted in a distinct new layer being formed in the rock strata of the Earth’s crust. One way of defining these layers is through the epoch. Previous epochs have been typified by periods of gross glaciation, mass flourishing and extinction of flora and fauna, and substantial changes in atmospheric CO2.
The Anthropocene is the latest proposed, although not yet fully accepted, geological epoch. It is defined by human’s impact on the Earth. In that tiny 0.02mm strip of a toilet paper roll that represents how long modern humans have existed, our activities have had such an impact on the Earth that we have created a hole in the ozone layer and raised greenhouse gas levels higher than they have been in over a million years. We are shrinking river deltas, glaciers, and ice caps, rising sea levels, reducing biodiversity, and increasing ocean acidity. (Demos 2017) Epoch’s usually last millions of years and yet human activity has created such a change on Earth’s surface that the previous epoch, the Holocene, is widely regarded as coming to an end after just 11,700 years. (Research Vocabularies Australia 2017) From disrupting microbial balances to creating entirely new landforms, the impact humans are having on the Earth is overwhelmingly large and it is easy to become bogged down in the negative aspects of it. However, the same science and history that condemns us is also a source for hope, “humanity has shown throughout history that we can solve our problems. We now need to turn our attention to climate change.” (Wuebbles 2017) Science is able to clearly illustrate causes and solutions to climate change but a shift in collective conscience and responsibility is required to solve the problem.
To elaborate on some of the science, rising greenhouse gas levels in the Earth’s atmosphere -which are a direct result of the industrial boom of the last 150 years- are the cause of much of the warming temperatures that have been observed over the last 50 years. (NASA 2019) Before this scientific evidence existed and environmental anxiety was prevalent in the public psyche, the value of land and landscape was determined by its virtuosity, its ability to be productive, or it’s aesthetic value. This is evidenced both in monetary land value as assessed and divided by surveyors, and in the creation of the first national parks. Just fifteen years after the first ever national park, Yellowstone in America, New Zealand established Tongariro National Park, which protected the highly geothermal area from development. It was here, in the mountainous terrain with lush forests, blue-green crater lakes, breath-taking waterfalls and secluded waterways, people felt they truly experienced the sublime. It was therefore deemed worthy of protection while less aesthetically pleasing areas -such as wetlands- which play a crucial role in maintaining ecological balances and protection from flooding are still being lost at alarming rates today. (Forest and Bird 2019)
Sublime is an oblique term used to describe things so awe inducing they transcend our ability to describe them. In the context of this essay, sublime refers to both an emotional state of awe as well as the pervasive cultural construct that garnered popularity within the Romantic period of western art, which was at its peak between approximately 1800 to 1850. The art produced in the period sought to evoke feelings of sublime within the viewer. The emotions attached to the sublime have been described differently over many years; William Wordsworth described it as a religious experience more akin to terror than pleasure (Cronon 1995) in The Prelude, an autobiographical poem published in 1799, which describes his crossing of a mountain pass.
Black drizzling crags that spake by the wayside
As if a voice were in them, the sick sight
And giddy prospect of the raving stream,
The unfettered clouds and region of the Heavens,
Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light
Were all like workings of one mind, the features
Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree;
Characters of the great Apocalypse
The types and symbols of Eternity
Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.
- William Wordsworth (Wordsworth, The Prelude 1936)
Whereas John Muir’s description of the sublime while in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada in 1869 could not be more different in tone.
No pain here, no dull empty hours, no fear of the past, no fear of the future (…) Every movement of the limbs is pleasure, while the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one’s flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure glow not explainable.
- John Muir (Muir 1911)
The way the sublime, and by extension nature, is spoken about is ever changing alongside our experiences and perspectives on the world we have left for the wilderness. This is seen not only in the way nature is written about but also in the way we depict it. Through the creation of national parks and preserving wilderness areas, the sublime has also impacted the way we define nature. To escape to nature is to pursue a subliminal experience, one that is cloaked in nostalgia for the way things were.
Figure 3, 3.1, 3.2. Evidence of desire lines in recorded in nature around the Waimakariri River,
In contrast to this, the contemporary version of nature most regularly encountered is heavily mediated in order to provide the most risk free and comfortable experience possible. Popular walking tracks are well formed and easy to follow, lookouts are built over the most scenic views, and hazards are well marked and cordoned off to help prevent misadventure. It is no longer the antimodern ideal it once was. Despite this more comfortable experience of nature being available, people stray from the provided infrastructure following pathways that can be described by the term ‘desire line.’
Desire lines are part of environmental architecture described by Google as “A path that pedestrians take informally, rather than taking a sidewalk or set route;” for example “a well-worn ribbon of dirt that one sees cutting across a patch of grass, or paths in the snow.” Often these lines delineate the most direct path between two points, such as through a garden between a carpark and coffee shop or between an official pathway such as a road, and the riverbank. Due to their inherent quality of deviating from standardised routes, desire lines not only represent informal pathways but also a less mediated and more primitive form of interaction with the environment.
My work tracks physical desire lines, the literal paths that lead to the river, as well as the subconscious desire lines that draw people to the river. I cannot speak for others; however, I know that the desire to escape the city is the one of the Waimakariri’s strongest allures. This desire to transcend the everyday by surrounding yourself in nature is nothing new and is well documented by writers such as Thoreau, whose 1854 memoir Walden, was written over a two-year period whilst living self-sufficiently in the woodlands of Massachusetts. Although I am not an avid reader of Thoreau, there are contemporary examples of this desire to escape -taken to the extreme- that have influenced my photographic practice.
Chris McCandless was a young American known for his fatal last trip into the Alaskan wilderness. The events leading up to his death inspired Jon Krakauer’s 1996 novel, Into the Wild, which was adapted into an award-winning film in 2007 directed by Sean Penn. McCandless is a controversial figure, many people dismiss his actions as foolhardy, naive, considering him as being thoroughly underprepared to face the Alaskan Wilderness. To them, he died unnecessarily for his romantic ideas of ‘the wild’ and its ability to relieve symptoms of the modern human condition. What Jon Krakauer focussed on in his book, and what is most applicable to my photographic practice, is the desire to escape society that drove McCandless into the wilds of Alaska. Throughout Into the Wild, Krakauer illustrates his points with quotes from various authors it is known McCandless held in high regard.
“The physical domain of the country had its counterpart in me. The trails I made led outward into the hills and swamps, but they led inward also. And from the study of things underfoot, and from reading and thinking, came a kind of exploration, myself and the land. In time the two became one in my mind. With the gathering force of an essential thing realizing itself out of early ground, I faced in myself a passionate and tenacious longing—to put away all thought forever, and all the trouble it brings, all but the nearest desire, direct and searching. To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows—a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.”
― John Haines
This quote by John Haines, used by Krakauer as a chapter introduction, is one that typifies most of the personal discoveries I have made while building a relationship with the Waimakariri River over the last two years. I did not set out to photograph myself or find myself in some way. I wanted to create a platform to speak out about something that frustrated me. Before starting, I knew my tendency to want to photograph isolated sites was linked to my personal anxieties around people, however I was not aware of how personal this project would become. Nor to what extent the work would begin to reflect myself.
This is to say that, beyond photographing in isolation, my images began to convey the anxieties I was attempting to escape from in daily life. The compositional techniques I subconsciously used when creating the images started to give a sense of how I felt, by the overwhelming nature of the work; how I use the landscape to hide from my own problems. Although being in the landscape does not inherently create these feelings, I have not shied away from using this subconscious aspect of my work. Instead I hope that without knowledge of my personal life, the final images and the way they are presented convey something of the environmental anxieties we should hold about the future of the planet.
Regardless of how I feel, from the discarded trash, makeshift playthings, and forgotten clothing that I am drawn to photographing, I know that the river functions as an escape for many other people as well. There is something about this area that draws people from all walks of life in, and although they are not often present in my photographs, empty beer bottles, firework wrappers, rope swings, four-wheel drive tracks, fishing detritus, and temporary shelters signal their presence. The function the river plays in people’s lives is therefore as varied as the fantasy’s children imagine on long car journeys.
Figure 4. Fast food waste and beer box left at the entrance to a popular fishing spot.
Prior to moving to Christchurch, I had never lived in such a large city nor one so devoid of geographical landmarks, a flat grid of streets bordered by acres of flat, gridded farmland. When I am in the city, I feel confined. The river too is confined and restricted by the stop banks intended to keep it in its current bed. The infrastructure, extractive industries, farms, and forestry that degrade the river’s quality too could be analogous for the way I feel Christchurch impacts upon my mental health.
When I am at the river however, I perceive the world differently. There is something to being drawn out to the middle of nowhere, where there’s probably not another human being within a kilometre of you, where there’s a vaguely marked path but no obligation to follow it. The wilderness feels overwhelmingly large and powerful but not threatening. The process of walking heightens my awareness that there are rules out here to follow. Not laws or social constructs like in the city, just pure common sense. The immense landscapes remind me how small and insignificant I am, how little my life means, and how little impact I will make. The timescale of a human life pales in comparison to the geological timescale these areas operate on. The issues of my everyday life seem inconsequential. This perception of my own mortality seems like what William Wordsworth and John Muir experienced many years ago in their writings, an experience of the sublime tainted by personal perceptions.
Figure 5. Rain clouds rolling over the seemingly vast riverbed.
Figure 6. Cascade Cove, William Hodges, 1775. (Hodges 1775)
Early images of New Zealand fetishised the landscape, relying heavily on elements of the sublime in their portrayal of the land. Pre-colonial artists such as William Hodges (1744-1797) played upon the dramatisation of the human figure within a theatrical landscape; vast, untamed, sometimes beautiful but always powerful. As the most recent addition to the British empire the function of these early images was not only to survey and document the landscape and its people but to display its untapped potential and virtuosity to the potential future colonists.
The time the Romantic period was at its peak (1800 to 1850), was also when Europeans began to first seriously survey and populate New Zealand, with the Treaty of Waitangi being signed in 1840. In many ways these first representations of New Zealand, loaded with the aesthetics of the sublime can still be recognized in the way the country presents itself to the world today. For many years New Zealand’s official tourism site, newzealand.com, has used the marketing slogan “100% pure New Zealand” combined with images of people in epic and picturesque landscapes to sell New Zealand as a destination to overseas holidaymakers. The slogan has come into question multiple times in recent years with groups such as Greenpeace NZ parodying the claim in order to question its legitimacy. To describe New Zealand as 100% pure is turning a blind eye to the irreparable ecological damage that has occurred and continues to occur in this country in the name of progress. With the human effect on the Earth nearing critical, it seems negligent to continue to employ these techniques. As climate activist Greta Thunberg said, “I don’t want your hope. I want you to act like the house is on fire, because it is,” it goes against my own morals to take typically beautiful images of this metaphorical house fire.
The earliest photographers to arrive in New Zealand continued Romantic traditions by focussing on documenting the progress of the colony. Their typical subjects included the new infrastructure, bridges, buildings, and ports as well as burgeoning industries like farming, forestry, and mining. Some of these photographers were officially appointed by the government to produce images documenting the progress of the colony. (Palenski 2019) Like the pre-colonial painters, the photographers also followed tropes of the sublime by including tiny human figures in vast landscapes. Along with the machines used to manipulate the land came the aesthetics of the industrial sublime, the images produced glorified the endeavours of the colonists, treating the land as either a resource or a backdrop to their enterprises. I try to subvert this aesthetic in my works, foregrounding the damage to the environment rather than sanctifying it.
Figure 7. 360 degree panorama of 4WD tracks and service roads underneath power lines.
Figure 8, 8.1, Images of men near the Waimakariri Gorge, taken from Hidden Light (Ken Hall 2019)
Approximately 100 such works of early photography in the Canterbury region, which at the time also included the West Coast, were included in the recent Hidden Light exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery (Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna O Waiwhetu 2019). The title of the show refers to the lack of representation of early South Island imagery in historical study of photography in New Zealand, but it could easily double as a hint to what isn’t documented in the exhibition. In his essay, Portrait of Te Waipounamu: A Review of Hidden Light, Simon Palenski recognises how the historical narratives in the show are “remembered at the expense of histories that instead outline the colonial and commercial exploitation that enabled this settlement (such as the history of Te Kerēme, the Ngāi Tahu Claim against breaches of land-sale contracts and Te Tiriti, which began in 1849).” (Palenski 2019) The exhibition also leaves “the questions of whether photography at this time operated as an arm of this colonisation, and whether photography can ever be separated from this process,” unanswered.
Early photography in New Zealand and exhibitions such as Hidden Light certainly distort the remembered history. Photography as a medium was reserved for the few wealthy enough to access it, hence why most of the images displayed have been taken by Pakeha males with a few exceptions being those taken by Pakeha women. With its history as a device for documentation and our instinctive, misguided belief in its truthfulness, photography can add a lot of credence to any discourse, especially that of remembered history.
New Zealand: Gift of the Sea was first published by Brian Brake and Maurice Shadbolt in 1963, and then expanded and republished in 1990. Previously I had enjoyed photo books from notable international photographers; the New Topographics group as well as the likes of Robert Adams, Joel Sternfeld, Richard Misrach, Jem Southam, and Alec Soth who dealt with themes unlike those I had strived to tackle in From the Muddy Banks. I felt looking at New Zealand photographers was necessary to understanding the place of my practice and expanding my knowledge of how we view our own country. Unlike the international photobooks I had looked to in the past, Gift of the Sea contains picturesque images and poetic writing that glosses over and attempts to forget such atrocities as the land wars and the forceful taking of Maori lands by Europeans, the decimation of native flora and fauna, and paints an idealised view of our racial history. Republished in 1990, it claims to capture the many moods of New Zealand but forgets the damage that has occurred, and the damage still being done to the people and lands of the country. The heavily romanticised history from a colonial viewpoint alongside the idyllic imagery creates the sense that New Zealand: Gift of the Sea is a work of propaganda rather than a critical photographic volume, one which whitewashes and homogenises our history in a way that removes the parts of the past that still need to be resolved and learned from.
Figure 9, 9.1 scanned pages from Gift of the Sea by Brian Brake and Maurice Shadbolt (Maurice Shadbolt 1990)
The above images are an example of the way Brian Brake’s images and Maurice Shadbolt’s text work together to create an illusion that paints an idealistic vision of New Zealand. The romantic atmosphere created by the long exposure and lighting in figure 9 accompanied by the caption, “The human forest is here,” undermines the inherent issues with extractive industries and their impact on the flora and fauna of New Zealand. While climate change and the idea of the Anthropocene may not have been well known when New Zealand: Gift of the Sea was first published, or even when it was republished in 1990, there has long been debate in New Zealand on the sacrifice or manipulation of natural beauty in order to siphon out financial gain. The images on the second scanned page intend to engage with the uptake of Christianity in New Zealand by Maori. The composition of the larger image implies a balance between the church and the Maori belief system through its 50/50 split of koru patterning and a distant, small church. As the koru carving is in focus and much closer to the viewers perspective eye, the image insinuates a retention, acceptance, or even domination of Maori beliefs, which does not align with unbiased historical records.
New Zealand: Gift of the Sea typifies what I seek to avoid in my own work. As a Pakeha, I feel if any viewpoint is mine to bear the colonial one is it, however, I cannot knowingly celebrate it. The colonial perspective of the landscape as a resource or something to possess is not sustainable with my fears for the future of the natural environment. By carefully rooting my work in my experiences and feelings I am attempting to dissuade viewers from presuming they are looking at hard facts and instead prompt them to think about the ideas in terms of their own experiences of nature. Just as it goes against my own morals to take beautiful images of the metaphorical house fire we have created; I don’t want my work to function in a way that exists without acknowledging the context it was created in. I see my work as being highly critical of the impact colonization has had on the New Zealand landscape, both in the past and present. Like the landscape photographers of the Hidden Light exhibition, I document something of the continuing process and ramifications of colonialism; Old man’s beard (Clematis vitalba) suffocates other plant life, bike, car, and walking tracks criss-cross the bare beech forest floor, and tire tracks tear across the silty riverbanks. The stark differences between my images and those in shown in Hidden Light are a result of, “the rampant degradation of the natural environment that followed colonisation.” (Palenski 2019) It is impossible to overlook the differences between the two. My images function as a condemnation not a celebration of this.
Figure 8 and 9, 1865 photograph of Whites Bridge crossing the Waimakariri River near where the highway bridges exist today, taken by Alfred Barker (Barker 1865) and an image taken by myself in the approximate location in 2019.
Panoramas have been a staple in representations of New Zealand landscape from the earliest depictions by artist’s travelling with naval explorer James Cook to contemporary artists like photographer Mark Adams. In his series Cook’s Sites, Adam’s traces the footsteps of Captain Cook, creating images of the sites he visited and utilising the multi-shot panoramic format in order to survey the landscape. In this sense, Adam’s uses the technique not as a function of science; but as a manner to slow down the action of looking with each frame. Through the linking of Cook to these images they become loaded with the tensions of colonisation and psychology of place. Land use, historical injustice, and cross-cultural relationships come together in the viewers mind, creating an uncomfortable beauty when paired with Adam’s meticulous framing of the locations. The use of panoramic views in Cook’s Sites echoes back to the views used by the artists travelling with Cook and the surveyors who mapped the land to gain ownership of it. While the artists used it to survey and map the lay of the land, Adams uses it to survey the changes to the landscape, the light, and hint at greater contextual information relating to the cultural, spiritual, and social values placed on each site.
Figure 9. Mark Adam's The ‘Food Basket of Rakaihautu’ from Horomaka, 1991 (Adams 1991)
Prior to the advent of aerial photography and the ability to create precise topographical maps in 1939, it was necessary to produce maps from images via photogrammetry. (Te Puna Matauranga O Aotearoa: National Library of New Zealand n.d.) Maps are integral to my practice in navigating the river and as a device intrinsic to the colonisation and claiming of land by European settlers and surveyors. Utilizing an interactive map to aid in displaying my back catalogue harks back to these influences as well as introducing a new element that looks toward the way we navigate unfamiliar places in the present day. It is not uncommon to use the ‘images taken in this location’ feature on Google Maps to choose everything from cafes and accommodation to holiday destinations. Like cartography and photogrammetry, the act of making physical prints of photographs is becoming a lost with the rise of digital media. In this sense it is logical to begin creating a digital archive of these images so they can remain easily accessible in the future.
Figure 10. Draft stages of designing the map to be used as part of a digital back catalogue.
In a similar fashion to bygone surveyors, the early panoramas I created were simply to map the landscape. It soon became apparent that the slow, cumbersome nature of using a tripod pushed my focus onto the composition and location of the image, detracting from my immediate experience of the location. By photographing without the tripod and extending my images into disjointed panoramic forms, they provide a prolonged experience both to the act of viewing and of creating the image.
Figure 11 Doublet (After Heavenly Creatures), Ann Shelton, 2001 (Shelton 2001).
Ann Shelton’s image Doublet (After Heavenly Creatures), of the Parker Hulme murder scene in the Port Hills of Christchurch has been influential in my thinking around the importance of the presentation and the conceptual reasoning for its final form. The image itself is largely unremarkable, the lighting is flat and altogether it is suggestive of a banal day on a walking track that could be almost anywhere. Shelton has considered the scale of the final image as proportionate not to the importance of the site (the exact location of the murder scene is not public knowledge), but to the emotional effect and heightened coverage of events that occurred there, and the way the events became imbedded in the public psyche after the release of Peter Jackson’s 1994 film, Heavenly Creatures. The mirroring at the centre of the diptych creates identical divergent paths that mirror each other in a constructed landscape. This implies a choice to be made, or perhaps two paradoxical realities, one where the murder happens and one where it doesn’t.
Although I have not manipulated my images to the same degree as Shelton, I have attempted to use similar compositional strategies to convey my discomfort with what I find myself looking at. The unusual perspective of panoramic shots laid flat confuse; rows of trees bar the viewer out, and the jittery method of hanging disorientates and unsettles the viewer.
In the above example, the stands of poplar trees, planted as windbreaks, bar the viewer from the ploughed fields beyond as the steep side of the stop bank rises behind them. The only respite for the viewer, and the way through the image, is via the narrow gaps in the walls of trees. Hidden in the shade of the poplars, the wide, open field -a product of expansive, European farming techniques- feels vaguely threatening. To bring myself to this work, it speaks of the respite from anxiety I find in these secluded locations and the challenges I must face when I return to society.
The psychological pathways I followed to the Waimakariri River have guided the development in my practice this year. Anthropomorphic qualities are often imposed on water, its ability to flow likened to the flow of time; we admire its ability to wear away stone, and its meditative characteristics are commonly desired. In Roni Horn’s Saying Water, she asks, ‘When you see yourself in water, do you recognise the water in you?’ (Horn 2001) The anthropomorphic qualities I project onto the Waimakariri River are often reflective of my own mental state. I feel confined and restricted by my commitments in Christchurch as well as by the monotonous flatness of the city. Similarly, the Waimakariri River is restricted by stop banks as it is channelled down the Canterbury Plains. This project was never intended to be about myself, however in the extended time I have spent by this river, engrossed in nature without distraction. I recognise myself in the images I produce, environmental anxieties inseparable from my own. The title The Ground You Walk On refers not only to the ground I walk on; it is the ground we all walk on. The natural environment is interconnected and inseparable from all aspects of our lives. We must treat it like the taonga it is.
Bibliography
Adams, Mark. 1991. The ‘Food Basket of Rakaihautu’ from Horomaka. Christchurch Art Gallery: Te Puna O Waiwhetu, Christchurch.
Barker, Alfred. 1865. Glass Plate Negative: White's Bridge, Waimakariri. Canterbury Museum, Christchurch.
Christchurch Art Gallery, Te Puna O Waiwhetu. 2019. Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography. https://christchurchartgallery.org.nz/exhibitions/early-canterbury-photography.
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