No one home but the ghosts

By ANDREW CLIFFORD

Amid the light-industrial businesses and new apartments in Eden Terrace, an old weatherboard villa with flaking paint is perched on a high stack of railway sleepers.

This relatively large house, complete with backyard section, should be a sought-after oasis in the high-density housing that increasingly crowds the inner city, but developers see such dwellings as simply a waste of premium property.

Like many others in the central suburbs, the house has seen better days and in recent years has been suitable only for budget student accommodation. And then the workers arrived, uprooting it from its foundations and chocking it up so it can again look its neighbours in the eye. This house gets a happy ending, and builders are now constructing a new lower floor for it to preside over.

But many such houses aren't so lucky and are exiled, on the back of a truck, to remain derelict in a field.

Auckland photographer Allan McDonald's exhibition at the Anna Miles Gallery documents these discarded dwellings as they decay, some still on their original sites, others quite literally put out to pasture.

"You could actually define them as ruins because nobody was interested in relocating them or resurrecting them anyway," he says. "They were so gone that they were just being left to turn to dust, basically. Some of them have fallen way outside marketplace value and I was interested in that [process]."

McDonald employs the pallid tones of fading paintwork and framed most of them with the matter-of-fact, front-on view common to both children's pictures and real estate catalogues. "I did want to just photograph in a fairly neutral, deadpan way," he says. "I guess that's just one of the ways that we are culturally trained to think about buildings and I didn't really want to do anything different from that."

This conventional viewpoint creates a tension with the violent way some of these houses have been pulled apart, providing views into the interior and echoing the architectural interventions of American artist Gordon Matta-Clark.

McDonald also sees it as acknowledging the apects of mortality inherent in these structures.

"The formal qualities in the way they are framed has got a reference to the simple monumentality of headstones," he says. "I guess photographers are always obsessed with memorialisation. Still photography is a perfect medium for capturing the end of things or remembering things that are about to pass away.

"There's this yard that I found in Swanson, which just looks like a graveyard. There is no front office and no signage telling you a telephone number if you wanted to buy one of these houses.

"It's probably one of the largest sites I've seen and it's packed full of houses just dying, which is interesting because most of them are in yards where they are up for sale again, so they are still part of the marketplace."

The images are imbued with pathos, and they also contain nostalgia for the lives once lived within them.

"The life gets taken out of [some houses] and they are almost presented as new buildings for a new owner to just step right into, without any ghosts.

"I wasn't really interested in photographing those buildings. I was interested in the buildings that had some sort of vestiges of the humanity that had happened there."

The abrupt displacement of suburban dwellings into more idyllic rural settings is different to McDonald's other recent projects, which document and critique the spread of the suburbs into the countryside and infill housing.

"Another project was to do with Auckland suburban sprawl and how it is chewing up huge amounts of rural landscape and the density of housing that's going on around Auckland.

"When I saw these old houses, which had this element of history, again, it's this nostalgia value of things that are disappearing. What was interesting was the way these developments actually displace history."

Exhibition

*What: Relocations and Demolitions, by Allan McDonald

*Where and when: Anna Miles Gallery

Suite 4J, 47 High St, Auckland, to Oct 30