Art from the lens

By T.J. McNAMARA

We all believe photographs - the camera cannot lie. Perhaps. There are two kinds of photographic truth: documentary truth and imaginative truth. And the situation is complicated by the post-modern emphasis on irony.

The nature of photographic truth is raised in a fascinating way by the young artist Mladen Bizumic, who has created the latest window work on Wellesley St at the New Gallery.

The tall, arched window is blacked out except for a circular area that contains a wonderfully sharp transparency. The photograph shows a delightful Arcadian scene by a still lake that reflects the sky and is bordered by trees. Dwellings are fitted comfortably into this charming landscape.

The irony is that this delightful-looking lake is a treatment pond in Albany.

There is further irony that the photographer may not have considered. A treatment pond is a good deal more Arcadian than emptying chamber pots in the gutter as Europeans did until the 18th century.

Whatever way we look at it, this is certainly the best window work at the New Gallery this year.

As We Were, a collection of photographs taken by Ans Westra between 1960 and 1990, showing at the John Leech Gallery, is documentary photography. Westra arrived from Holland in 1957 and set out to use her position as an outsider to record life in New Zealand through a fresh, uncommitted eye.

She concentrated on documenting what she saw as the true life of the Maori people and landed in controversy in 1964 when she took a series of photographs published as a school bulletin called Washday at the Pa. This bulletin was withdrawn because it was thought to denigrate Maori in the way it depicted rural poverty.

There are two photographs from this publication in the exhibition. One shows stereotypically picturesque Maori children laughing as they carry another child in a kete. The other, much more original, photo shows children enjoying the warmth of an old-fashioned range.

What really makes this photograph talk about "the way we were" is not the children or the range but the Califig bottle on the mantelpiece (even though it has a candle in it). Some people cooked on gas, some on electricity, some used a wood range, but every child, God help us all, was dosed on California Syrup of Figs.

A photograph in which the personality of people works powerfully is one taken at the Sweetwaters Rock Festival in 1972, where a young couple are wrapped in a blanket that gives them a monumental shape. It is a sombre image but very strong.

The most effective photographs make race irrelevant. One shot shows the quick intentness of boys catching crickets in Greymouth. It is the peeling facade of the Four Square store in the background beyond the long grass that emphasises the way we were.

Equally sharply caught are the sceptical, judgmental faces of fashionably dressed figures watching a Miss New Zealand pageant in Wellington. One is wearing a fur hat and coat, now as politically incorrect as racial stereotypes.

The photographs of Ava Seymour at the Anna Bibby Gallery are more consciously "arty". The show is called Heartlands, and a typical work shows a bright red heart smack in the middle of a tussock landscape.

Seymour is the current Frances Hodgkins Fellow at the University of Otago and the landscape is in Central Otago.

The red heart is there because the artist has collaged it on to the panoramic landscape photograph and rephotographed it. There is a long tradition of such montage in photography, though now it is being superseded commercially by digital manipulation.

If we allow ourselves to believe that the odd objects have become part of the landscape then the photographs are effective and truly strange. If the objects look just stuck on then the technique gets in the way.

At times, Seymour deliberately leaves evidence of the making of the work, as in the overlapping pieces of blue in the sky that take the clouds out in Heartlands 3.

In the best of these photographs the dream object sits firmly in the landscape, although none of them casts a shadow which might have made them more real.

Most effective is Heartlands 4, where the object is a skull which appears enormously large, with the edges of the plates that form the dome prominent.

The skull is a bold, simple shape and it works well, as does the vast puff-ball or pavlova at the centre of Heartlands 9, which is attended by a couple of meringue-like objects out of scale with the landscape and more sinister than Daleks.

Seymour's work has always been exploratory. In past series she has suggested that people who grew up in state houses were seriously weird. She has made capital out of rubber bondage gear. Now she explores the sinister qualities suggested by rocks and vertebrae.

Sometimes she brings off remarkable images, but at times the contrivance is too obvious.