B.

Ben Cauchi deftly manipulates light sources, studio effects and darkroom techniques to create a mysterious, illusory zone. Known for his use of mid-nineteenth-century photographic processes, Dead Time reveals the results of a recently completed residency as Frances Hodgkins Fellow in Dunedin.

Most of these are shimmering ambrotypes and tintypes – photographs that exist as one-off objects. In transforming picture plane into conjurer's stage, Cauchi creates lingering questions in these images, which resist and retain as many of their secrets as they are willing to reveal.

This exhibition is being toured by the Hocken Library, and joins those by Laurence Aberhart, and Thaw (highlighting Ernest Edward Mills Joyce's photographs from Canterbury Museum) in touching upon different aspects of historical photographic technique.