Richard Wotton outside Del Mar Flats in Ingestre St in 2022. Photo / Kevin Double
Capturing the unusual in the ordinary and character in the everyday, the exhibition “Richard Wotton: A Selective Eye, Photographs 1975–2025” celebrates 50 years of the well-known Whanganui photographer’s work.
The exhibition is on at Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery from December 13 to May 3.
Arranged in thematic groupings, the exhibition includes a selection of photographs from Wotton’s interest in portraits, architecture (for which he is nationally renowned), landscape and two series of colour photographs.
Senior curator and programmes manager Greg Donson said the exhibition was “a must-see” for both Whanganui locals and national visitors.
“There are so many buildings, interiors and people that locals will recognise. For our national visitors, these images will resonate because they also speak to what makes Aotearoa unique, and many images are from across New Zealand and overseas. Fifty years of image making all in one space is a special thing and also reflects how things have changed.”
Wotton, who was the Sarjeant’s in-house photographer from 1987-2018, began professional photography in the 1960s and 70s, selling motorbike and car racing photographs to the riders and drivers.
In 1975, when “The Active Eye” contemporary photography exhibition, curated by the late Luit Bieringa, came to Whanganui, Wotton was inspired by what he saw.
“I went out that afternoon and took what I still consider was my first good photograph, which is in the show. It was a little church down on the Turakina Beach Rd. It was very, very stark when I photographed it. Just a big sort of concrete sarcophagus thing taking up a lot of the foreground in the image, and glaring white [church] walls behind it. There’s another memorial [off to one side] that’s a sort of obelisk – so very, very simple, and still a strong image. I think it really took off for me that day, sort of crystallised things,” Wotton said.
When he used film, Wotton developed and printed his own black and white photographs in a darkroom at home, preferring the medium because of the semi-abstract effect with the colour removed from the images.
“I think it gives a more sculptural look to an image – the effects of the light, shades of grey, black and white – and that cuts away a lot of distraction, especially in a portrait."
One of his earlier portraits, in 1984, was of a woman truck driver.
“She and her husband had a mobile car crusher and they were working at the Balgownie dump one morning. She drove the truck with a load of crushed cars down to the railway station, unloaded them and drove the truck back while her husband crushed another truckload. So I got a portrait of her leaning against the truck.”
A later portrait exhibition at the Sarjeant, “Marking Time: Portraits of the Inked” which ran from November 2016 to February 2017, featured 45 black and white portraits focusing on tattooed people, exploring the visual “architecture” on their skin.
Not so much a fan of colour, in the 1970s and 80s, Wotton nevertheless used Cibachrome, which he said was one of very few options then available for archival colour printing of photographs.
“It used a really high-gloss sort of plastic paper, I suppose you’d call it, and the resulting prints were very, very crisp and sharp - quite beautiful.”
A series of colour photographs from the early 1980s includes images of plastic packaging tape around crates and boxes. Wotton was attracted by their colours and the shapes they made.
“I was driving around town one Sunday afternoon looking for something to photograph and I spotted a pile of green plastic around a bundle of black, raw rubber on the forecourt of a tyre company. The resulting image [Tape #11] is just three colours: green and black with a strip of pink tape slicing through it, which looked great. This series is the only semi-abstract work I’ve ever done.”
His next venture into colour took off in 2019 with his “Flora” series on seeing a bouquet of flowers growing wild. Then two years later he started another studio portrait series - people he simply picked out of a crowd because he found their faces compelling.
Donson said Wotton’s practice tied into the history of national and local photography, in company with photographers such as William Harding (1826-1899), Frank Denton (1869-1963) and Mark Lampe (1884-1972). His work sits alongside that of Laurence Aberhart, Peter Peryer, Wayne Barrar, Ann Noble and Ans Westra in the Sarjeant’s extensive photographic collection.
“Wotton is a very skilled photographer and over the course of 50 years has built a body of work that really does demonstrate a selective eye, someone with a really unique view of the world,” Donson said.
Artist Talk: Richard Wotton
Date: Sunday, December 14
Time: 11am to noon
Venue: Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery exhibition space
No bookings. Free. All welcome.