Te Hkoi Toi: Finding the fine art in photography – Stuff

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Installation image of Joyce Campbell's The Sunken City at Bartley & Company Art.

Photography today is, like clouds of digital vapour, literally everywhere. Yet predictions that such ubiquity might lead to a mass watering down of the photograph and photographers value have, you could say, evaporated.

This weekend - just as photo-sharing app BeReal spreads virally to phones, setting a new radical visual culture low bar - Wellington events demonstrate that photography, in a myriad of physical formats, has never been better cared for as a fine art.

At Te Papa all of daylight Saturday and at a clutch of surrounding galleries Sunday, the festival Photobook/NZ is providing one of the best visual art public programmes of the year. Associated are an interesting suite of photography exhibitions across galleries. Included are Russ Flatts bold response to Christian homophobia, Hell Bent at The Engine Room at Massey University, new Mori photobooks by fine art students and grads, M Wai R at Photospace and Peter Hannken in the Bowen Galleries window.

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Work (L-to-R) by Gavin Hipkins, Peter Peryer and Edith Amituanai in It's Personal at Webb's.

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A contemporary counter to snap-happy ubiquity is the work of the late Peter Peryer. With such keen care and formal focus he found both gorgeousness and surreal humour in mundanity. Taking up digital colour photography in his 60s, Peryer proved with a camera phone that a critical passionate eye for the way objects vibrate in space was still something worth selling, beyond Instagram.

A small survey exhibition of colour photographs from his last 12 years, 2006-2018 at Hamish McKay Gallery in Jessie St puts it beyond doubt. These are prints made in editions ranging between 10 and 25 by the photographer before he died. There will be no more. There are familiar stone warm classics - the rose, the meat carcass, the dropped melted ice cream cone - mixed in with what to me are the lesser known. A remarkable, gently animated camellia from Peryers last year, has all the structural intrigue of the Fibonnaci golden spiral.

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Peter Peryer's Ice Cream 2007 at Hamish McKay Gallery.

Together they demonstrate Peryers mix with the eye of exactness and adventure, with a love of pattern in finding new geometric lines on the disappearing picture plane, and a late blooming appreciation for the complexity of colour. Peryer is not afraid to push for refinement with even the most banal of objects. While his flowers reveal new worlds, his orange pumpkin - surely destined for a hipster eatery close by - is a step too far for even me.

With pathos Peryer draws us into scenes which often speak to me obliquely to our sometimes unsettled cultural relationship with the world. Take Newell Oamaru. I teeter woozily on a landing at the top of a steep old domestic staircase before a wooden picket gate. Im taken off my feet by a churning spatial arrangement of clashing floral carpet and wallpaper-clad walls and ceiling - tripping on the precipice before I risk descend into some mixed-up colonial hell.

Like a partner suite, a set of Peryers earlier black and white hits (the dead cow! The sand shark!) are at Webbs auction house galleries on Marion St as part of Its Personal, a generous selection of work from photography collectors, former ad man Howard Grieve and photographer Gabrielle McKone (a Photobook/NZ organiser). In surveying the range of contemporary photography its a show the envy of any public gallery. Indeed, no work is for sale, and its curated by ex City Gallery senior curator Robert Leonard.

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A wall of Yvonne Todd's work in It's Personal at Webb's.

Its Personal is testament to the special long-game role the major private collector has had for photography over the decades. In that way theres public good also mixed into their collecting habits. The show is marked by its diversity of approaches and formats, and a mix of surprises (the quiet poetic 80s polaroids of Janet Bayly) and more familiar works.

McKone and Grieve have also clearly had an eye for keeping up with some artists practice. A big wall of Yvonne Todds provides a strong Gothic-suburban mini survey. Often Todds portraits have a pregnant power (in one self-portrait, literally) in making you question darkly what behind the studied pose a person has done, or theyre likely to do when they walk away in the future.

Joyce Campbell provides remarkable meditations on our relationship to the mysterious unseen in the environment through the radical employment of historical photographic technology at Webbs, in photobooks at the festival and in a stunning new installation at Bartley and Company The Sunken City. Its an exhibition notable for how the internal underwater architectural abstraction of her big photographs (akin to big modernist painting) are in quiet dialogue with a more didactic but very eloquent words in a handmade book on display, and wonderful prints if Piranesi from the 18th century of futuristic prisons, of moving cogs, chains and staircases from the artists own collection.

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Work by Joyce Campbell in It's Personal at Webb's.

In this majestic but oblique conversation between mental interiors, Im drawn into considering the prisons our economic systems place on our expectations of being able to enact positive change. And the way Campbells moving shards suggest we have the mechanisms within us to make those shifts. As Campbell writes, with the global economy in a medically induced coma, we contemplated restarting the machine piecing it all back together.

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Te Hkoi Toi: Finding the fine art in photography - Stuff