Guy Fawkes

This set is from Guy Fawkes night in Deborah Bay. Why we still celebrate the hanging, drawing and quartering of that poor catholic bugger I've got no idea. I guess a reason of some sort is required for the collective pyromania. Maybe we could ditch old Fawkes and instead celebrate Matariki with a bang instead.

Anyway, the kids had fun and no one got burned.

Karakia in Deborah Bay

Huata Holmes from Karitane Marae came down to the bay on Saturday. He said a karakia to lift the tapu on the water since John died there two weeks previously. A small crowd of John's family and friends and Bay residents came along and took part.

Marco T blues band

This set was shot for Will, Kalin and Marco (left to right, above) as album art for their first CD. I'll update this post when the CD and the band have a name!

John Billington R. I. P.

I took this picture while walking home from a party early on Saturday morning, 14 November.

John Billington, who I used to talk about photography with, had drowned while rowing out to his boat in the bay a couple of hours previously.

Camera mast / Hochstative

I got a bit sidetracked with that last post. I meant to be detailing my processes in coming up with the Constructions exhibition. So, back to task.

From where I parked my car the walk to Art School took me past the stadium construction site so I was aware of progress and changes as they occurred day to day.

Once, when I was struggling with too many different projects while studying at the Design Dept. of Otago University, Nick Laird suggested I try to find a common link between them all. I took that to mean to choose your projects so that you are working on different aspects of the same thing for different courses. Thats what got the stadium going for me as my coursework exhibition subject.

From then on I stepped up photography when I could (shooting with the camera mast is very weather dependent, more than a breeze and you pack up). At a certain point I felt some relief from the pressure to gather images because I had most of the raw material for a show. However, the construction site is a changing thing and large machines would appear at different locations on site from day to day and new structures would appear making it difficult to try to portray an up to date view of how the site looked.

In 2004/5 while in Switzerland I was contracted for a while to photograph buildings. For this I used an elevated camera on portable camera mast. It is a series of telescopic tubes with a fold out base. The camera is set at the top and then the sections are raised and locked off one by one until the camera is at the desired height. The maximum reach is 16m or about four stories. I have been using this equipment in New Zealand to photograph buildings for real estate. With this exhibition have begun to realise the creative potential of the camera mast.

I decided to use the proportional distortion technique on the construction site images for roughly the same reasons that I used it on landscape images. That is; it transformed the scene into something at once familiar and unusual, it compressed the same amount of information as a wide panorama into a proportional format (about 4:3) that is easier for the eye to scan, there is somehow a kind of thrill or exaggerated response to the image in line with the exaggerated proportions. It also can be scene as a kind of alienation device that changes the viewers relationship with what has been a very contentious subject. I was also aware that I was using the distortion in much the same way as I used tilt-shift for the accompanying images; I believe it to be a mature technique (or possibly a tool) to be used to show a subject in a new way.

Another reason is that it is mine. I developed it from scratch rather than, in the instance of tilt-shift, taking on an established technique for my own uses. As such it is in my interest to keep working with it, to develop it further and stake an artistic claim upon it as my own practice.

I used a slightly different formula than previously in coming up with the proportions. I composed and cropped the undistorted image as I liked and then sized it according to the paper size of the Otago Polytechnic large format printer. So each image (bar one) was printed at 610mm x 900mm although they came from varying sized undistorted panoramas. So each image is distorted in an arbitrary way, not that it seems to be noticeable.

Developing the image

I have been working with distorting panorama (i.e. very wide) images for a couple of years now and Constructions was the third exhibition of mine which uses this technique. For this reason there wasn't a lot of development that went into creating the images. I was fairly well sticking to what was, for me, the tried and true. The difference was that the subject matter was specifically architectural construction in one site rather than searching the hills at sunset for sublime landscape scenery.

One reason for deciding on this technique and subject was the short time frame I had to complete an exhibition as part of my Art School course work. I had already begun work on photographing the changes as the stadium was built as part of a longer term and wider ranging project. This is the photographic documenting of Dunedin's heritage industrial precincts and the buildings in them. It is my plan to gradually collect images of interesting and generally underrated industrial buildings to form an image bank for historical and educational purposes. The thing about these buildings is that they can and do get torn down with no notice at the whim of the owners.

Dunedin's Architectural heritage is fairly well established by such buildings as the Train Station and Law Courts. Modern examples such as the Dental School are also celebrated. Lesser celebrated are buildings such as the Donald Reid & Co. Ltd wool store in Parry St.

Donald Reid and Co. Ltd wool store, Parry St.

This building is certainly not lovely to look at (although it does have a some of Art Deco stylings around it's entrance) but it has some importance to Otago and New Zealand's economic history in that our country was built on the exports that went through such buildings. It is also quite a feat of engineering to have the showroom floor, which must be about an acre or more in area, lit by the south east facing glass faces of the roof and all supported on just a few pillars. My family history also involves this building as it was built by the firm started by my great great grandfather. My father (named Donald like myself and my son) told me about the celebrations when the building was opened in 1936 and he was ten years old.

Now the building is being demolished, without a party to celebrate it's history and use, to make room for the eastern corner of the Stadium. I would have liked to see it stand and some interesting use made of that huge perfectly lit space of the showroom floor. However, what was important for me to do was to make sure that a photographic documentation was made before the asbestos roofing was (hopefully) carefully taken down and bagged for disposal and the rest came tumbling down.

With the help of a chap at the Dunedin City Council who gave me the key for an afternoon I shot several hundred images of how the building was after the last workers moved out. I had considered using some of those images in the Constructions exhibition because of the obvious link but I decided that it would be opening a another subject which would detract from the theme that I had established with Constructions.

Those images will wait for another showing and will probably include some of the buildings demolition which is in progress now.

Pinhole cameras stacked and ready

As you can see, I'm getting ready for summer solstice when I will be fixing these pinhole cameras to various places with a view of the suns path. Then I will only have to wait a mere six months until I bring them in again and process the images. See the solargraphy post below for a look at my test results.