"Dargaville, Northland, April 17, 2003"
Art
Wings of desire, and other films
by David Eggleton
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURENCE ABERHART,
Marshall Seifert Gallery, Dunedin.
Laurence Aberhart is the photographer as stalker of the Beautiful and the Sublime, whose hyper-real photographs have an almost hallucinatory force. As with painters Shane Cotton and Bill Hammond, Aberhart fetishes history, turning it into allegory and thus creating images that supply enduring emblems of the nation’s narrative. Preoccupied by the flotsam and jetsam of our colonial legacy, he is the last explorer, his photographs a guidebook to the state of the New Zealand psyche.
Though charged with human presence, his landscapes are mostly empty of people: statues become substitutes, as if living people had been turned to stone. Thus his photographs offer a voluptuous sense of time slowed down to geological speed.
A master of formal technique, Aberhart focuses on oblique objects – cemetery headstones, war memorials, Masonic lodges, halls, churches, bits and pieces of landscape – and confronts them. He pauses at a boundary, then sets up his old-fashioned camera on its tripod, focuses and sets the exposure, and then waits. (He uses an eight by 10 inch plate camera, in which you see the image reflected on a sheet of glass before you take the picture. Exposures can take up to an hour.)
His art is about patience and contemplation, where the clarity, purity and purpose of the camera’s focus establish a kind of revelation. Aberhart photographs show maximum definition and detail – with a graded palette of delicate grays, toned to perfection with gold or selenium tints – and an extraordinary sense of depth and space.
The effect is to create trance-like images in which monuments and buildings become almost otherworldly. Thus, exquisitely rendered, the various facades – a sky, a mountain, a wall, marked and scarred and weathered – seem to record time evaporating. There is also a tenderness and a spirituality to the images. You need to approach them with a certain protocol and alertness if you are to understand the photographer’s vision, a vision that establishes him as one of the most remarkable photographers of the metaphysical at work in this country.
Aberhart’s photographs show the granular texture of things seen as if to prove that every grain of sand is numbered: each image is crammed with a sense of the particularity of the world. And each has a sense of pressure and tension, as if these cryptic structures might crumble before your eyes to demonstrate that Aberhart’s thesis of being and nothingness is correct.
The assembly of photographs old and new at the Marshall Seifert Gallery proves the consistency and fidelity of Aberhart’s vision. He admits to being drawn to the same few subjects, for example, the bunker-like Masonic lodges that dot our landscape. These emblems of sacred ritual are made to seem at once eccentric yet somehow essential.
Melancholy and brooding, Aberhart’s photographs are bathed in a sepulchral light – a “last light”, perhaps, as he terms in “Last Light, Ships at Sea off Newcastle NSW, July 28, 1997”, where the bleached vastness of the sky is a backdrop to oil tankers and other ships spread across the horizon and suspended in the milky light of evening. Each photograph is dated so that we might know when Aberhart managed to carve a crystalline image out of a solid block of time: that tiny white moon suspended in a planetary glow over Napier; that ineffably delicate smudge of cloud on the transcendental cone of Mt Taranaki, seen from a long way away.
