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Meet Me in the Square
Behind the scenes
Now's a good time to make Friends with the Gallery. We're offering Friends 20%* off our new book of photographs of 1980s Christchurch by David Cook.
Photograph by David Cook, from Meet Me in the Square: Christchurch 1983-1987
I wasn't old enough in the 1980s to be hanging out in the Square by myself – okay, yeah I was, but we're talking late 80s. We've just finished printing David Cook's new book, Meet Me in the Square, and it's an incredible summary of central Christchurch in the mid 80s.
Most of us in the office are old enough to remember the twentieth century's most charmless decade. (We have one staffer who wasn't even born then, like. What?!) But David's photos of Christchurch - which he took as a young photography student at the University of Canterbury - remind me that Christchurch in the 80s was more than ra-ra skirts and girls just having fun. Cathedral Square, Centennial Pool, Lancaster Park, schoolboys, punks, nuns. This is nostalgia in a good way.
These are some of the photographs from David's book that we're really enjoying right now.
#meetmeinthesquare
Related reading: David Cook
Exhibition
David Cook: Meet Me in the Square
24 May 2015
Cathedral Square, Centennial Pool, Lancaster Park, schoolboys, punks, nuns – a photographic journey through 1980s Christchurch.
Notes
Spotting Dad
When Caroline first found out about the David Cook: Meet Me in the Square exhibition through the Gallery's Facebook page before it opened, she had an inkling that she might see her father in the show.
Interview
The significance of everyday things
During the winter of 1984 my mother, father and I packed an overnight bag and climbed into Dad’s Hillman Hunter. I was five years old and, as far as I could remember, it was the first time we’d ever ventured outside of Blenheim.
Notes
A stroll down memory lane. . .
Karen Cunningham found out her photo was in the David Cook: Meet Me in the Square exhibition when a resident at Edith Cavell Home and Hospital brought it to her attention during a weekly game of housie.
Notes
Catch the Bus Into Town
Megan made a special trip to the David Cook: Meet Me in the Square exhibition last week after seeing a photograph in The Press of her and her friend at the Cathedral Square bus stop, taken in 1984.
Notes
Sisters Growing Up in Christchurch
Since the exhibition David Cook: Meet Me in the Square opened at 209 Tuam Street, the Gallery's Visitor Hosts have spoken to several people who either appear in the photographs themselves or have a personal story to share about a particular photograph in the show.
Article
Meet Me in the Square
The first thing you notice, even before the pageboy haircuts and oversized plastic spectacles, is the absence of smiles. The unhappiness in the eyes of the average Cantabrian snapped on these grey, chilly streets seems palpable. Even the Christ's College cadet, cradling a rifle as part of soldiery drill, looks ready to turn the gun on himself. In 1983, the year when David Cook began a project to explore his hometown, a camera as his compass, most locals look distinctly brassed off.
Collection
David Cook DIC Beaths Winter Fashion Parade
The former DIC Beaths department store was converted into the former Christchurch Bus Exchange on the corner of Cashel and Colombo Streets.
Collection
David Cook Funeral In The Cathedral
David Cook took more than 6,000 photographs of Ōtautahi Christchurch in the 1980s, recording life in the city from unexpected vantage points. Here, his camera peers through the door of the Anglican cathedral in the city square to a waiting hearse outside. It’s a scene of lost things; some obvious, others overlaid by the city’s subsequent history – the death that prompted the funeral, the (now absent) flow of traffic in Cathedral Square, and the cathedral itself, nearly wiped off the map during the Christchurch earthquake of 2011, and now being rebuilt.
(Absence, May 2023)
