
Laurence Aberhart Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, October 1981. 8 x 10" contact print. Collection of Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū, purchased 2016
15 September 2017 – 6 February 2018
Iconic and unseen early photographs of Christchurch by Laurence Aberhart
Aberhart started here. Between 1975 and 1983, when the internationally-renowned New Zealand artist lived in and around Christchurch, he began to photograph the everyday world around him. Christchurch is where Aberhart developed his eye for the things that later brought his work to international prominence: his interest in the vanishing past, vernacular histories, and typological series, all emerged over this period. Aberhart’s early photographs, some of them now iconic but many unseen or little known, reveal a city – and a way of life – that no longer exists. Long-gone fast food joints, masonic lodges, lonely monuments and cemeteries are brought together with stucco houses, weird domestic scenes and haunting family groups.
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Curator:
Lara Strongman -
Exhibition number:
1040
From the Store
Related reading: New Zealand, Photography
Exhibition
Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, March 1983
Laurence Aberhart's 1983 photograph of Lyttelton children is displayed on our Gloucester Street billboard.
Exhibition
Laurence Aberhart: Nature Morte
1 November 1992
Nature Morte is an exhibition of 105 photographs, taken between 1971 and 1989 by New Zealand photographer Laurence Aberhart.
Exhibition
Laurence Aberhart
12 October 2008
Over 200 key works by an artist described as 'the essential visual poet of New Zealand's past'.
Director's Foreword

Director's Foreword
However cold or wet it is as I write this (and certainly it’s raining at present), our September Bulletin heralds the coming of spring, and with it, the promise of growth, renewal and hope.
Commentary

Laurence Aberhart
New Zealand artist Laurence Aberhart is internationally regarded for his photographs of unpeopled landscapes and interiors. He photographs places redolent with the weight of time, which he captures with his century-old large-format camera and careful framing. But he’s always taken more spontaneous photographs of people too, particularly in the years he lived in Christchurch and Lyttelton (1975–83) when he photographed his young family, his friends and occasionally groups of strangers. ‘If I lived in a city again,’ he says, ‘I would photograph people. One of the issues is that I even find it difficult to ask people whether I can photograph a building, so to ask to photograph them – I’m very reticent. I also know that after a number of minutes of waiting for me to set cameras up and take exposure readings and so on, people can get rather annoyed. So it’s not a conscious thing, it’s more just an accident of the way I photograph.’
Collection

Laurence Aberhart Kamala, Astral and Charlotte, Lyttelton, March 1983
Laurence Aberhart took this photograph in March 1983, just before he left his home in Lyttelton to move to Russell in the Far North with his family. It depicts his daughters and a small family friend, framed by a niche in the wall of the cold store in a Lyttelton fish and chip shop. (The building later became the Lava Bar attached to the Volcano Café, and was demolished following the Christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011.) Because he knew he was leaving, Aberhart took photographs of local places – houses, shops, old commercial signs – that he'd previously noted when driving around Christchurch and Lyttelton. ‘They were, in the main, sites that weren’t enough as a straight photograph,’ he commented. ‘And so I put people into them.’
The girls sit in a compressed space that’s too small for adults for enter. Kamala and Charlotte gaze steadily and coolly at the camera while little Astral looks off to the side, one finger in her mouth. They are serene, yet fiercely present and full of life. The recessed composition of the figures brings to mind statues placed in niches in Gothic cathedrals: it is as if they are three putti or cherubs come to life in the modern, secular world. Aberhart has described himself as a recorder of ‘a world that can’t stand long’ – the phrase comes from the song of the same name recorded by American country and gospel singer Roy Acuff in 1948. Before entering his darkroom, he often plays it. ‘This world can't stand long / Be ready and don't be late…’ A chronicler of the New Zealand vernacular, Aberhart’s world is the overlooked and the outmoded, which he continues to photograph with the same century-old view camera he bought second-hand in the late 1970s.
Collection

Laurence Aberhart Interior, Tomb, Epernay, Champagne, France, 22 September 1994
There’s a timelessness to Laurence Aberhart’s photography, a quality that he calls “adriftness”. Though his images are contemporary, they bear a great weight of history – a product both of the century-old 8x10 camera he uses, and his interest in subjects that reveal the persistence of the past in the present: graveyards, outmoded architecture, abandoned shops. He took the photograph of the tomb in Epernay, in the Champagne district of France, through a small grille. “From memory,” he said, “what I liked was the beautiful reverse projection of her face on the wall. And one of the panes of glass had been replaced by red glass, which effectively turned the world outside into a negative.” He saw the tiny room as both a camera and a projector, a dark chamber in which the past could reappear momentarily in the present.
(Now, Then, Next: Time and the Contemporary, 15 June 2019 – 8 March 2020)
Collection

Laurence Aberhart Kamala and Charlotte in the grounds of the Lodge, Tawera, Oxford
This photograph belongs to a series that Laurence Aberhart began in the 1970s in which he focussed on sites of commemoration, such as war memorials, and structures associated with ritual. He looked at the significance of Masonic Lodges in small New Zealand communities where they served as a place of bonding for men. Women were excluded and membership involved elaborate rituals. Using an old-fashioned, large format Korona camera, the style here is that of an historical documentary photograph, a scene as a simple record, but the strange poses of the children and the eerie light create a sense of mystery. Aberhart’s evocative images reinforce the importance of the photograph as a recorder of history and culture. Aberhart began his photographic career in the late 1960s. His work is represented in all major New Zealand public collections, the Australian National Gallery in Canberra and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney.
Notes

Award wins!
We’re delighted to announce that Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetū has won a number of accolades at the 21st Museums Australasia Multimedia & Publication Design Awards. The prestigious annual awards celebrate excellence in the Australasian museum sector and were presented on Tuesday evening during a gala dinner in Melbourne.
Notes

Time, memory, photography
As part of the recent Word Christchurch Writers and Readers Festival, Christchurch Art Gallery was a partner in the presentation of 'Remembering Anzac', a session which paired photographic artist Laurence Aberhart with historian Jock Phillips.
Notes

Kamala and Charlotte in the grounds of the Lodge, Tawera, Oxford, 1981, by Laurence Aberhart
This article first appeared in The Press on 9 July 2008
It is adapted from an essay in the book Laurence Aberhart, published by Victoria University Press in partnership with City Gallery, Wellington.
Event

Waitangi Day: Areta Wilkinson and Mark Adams – Repatriation: Also known as The Great Moa Hunt
Hear the artists discuss Repatriation, a collaborative project addressing the situation of the artefact and Ngāi Tahu taonga within museums in Aotearoa and abroad.
Exhibition
Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast Photography
Uncovering the remarkable, largely unseen work of early New Zealand photographers.
Commentary

Representing Women: Ann Shelton’s Dark Matter
What is ‘dark matter’? For theoretical physicists it is matter that cannot be directly observed but whose existence is nevertheless scientifically calculable – productively present yet simultaneously invisible. In a similar vein, the everyday phrase ‘dark matter’ describes objects, conditions and situations that harbour unease or trauma. Trauma that is often concealed, repressed, or buried. Both definitions are active in Ann Shelton’s mid-career review exhibition Dark Matter, and they provide a rich point of entry into this compelling collection of her photographic work. These are photographs that bristle with intensity and refuse to let their subjects die a quiet archival death.
Exhibition
Ann Shelton: Dark Matter
An expansive view of Ann Shelton’s tightly conceived, large scale and hyperreal photography
Artist Profile

The Devil’s Blind Spot
Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery has a long-standing tradition of curating exhibitions of emerging and early-career artists. We do this in order to contribute to the ecology of the local art world, as well as because – quite straightforwardly – we’re interested in the practices of artists at all stages of their careers, and would like to bring the work of outstanding younger artists to wider public attention. The Devil’s Blind Spot is the latest in this ongoing series, but unlike earlier exhibitions, it’s concerned with a single medium – photography.
Exhibition
The Devil’s Blind Spot: Recent Strategies in New Zealand Photography
Recent photography by an emerging generation of New Zealand artists.
Exhibition
Olivia Spencer Bower: Views from the Mainland
A selection of watercolours by one of Canterbury’s most treasured artists.
Commentary

The Camera as a Place of Potential
To Māori, the colour black represents Te Korekore – the realm of potential being, energy, the void, and nothingness. The notion of potential and the presence of women are what I see when I peek at Fiona Pardington’s 1997 work Moko. And I say peek deliberately, because I am quite mindful of this work – it is downright spooky. Moko is a photographic rendering of a seeping water stain upon the blackboard in Pardington’s studio, taken while she was the recipient of the Frances Hodgkins Fellowship in Dunedin in 1997.
Exhibition
He Rau Maharataka Whenua: A Memory of Land
Canterbury modernist landscape painting from the collections of Te Puna o Waiwhetū Christchurch Art Gallery, poignantly revised from within a Kāi Tahu perspective
Exhibition
Joyce Campbell: Flightdream
Joyce Campbell’s immersive video work takes the viewer on a journey into the ocean’s fathomless depths, exploring processes of creation and annihilation.
Notes

Largest ever Fiona Pardington exhibition opens in Christchurch
Death, sex, flesh and the female gaze are among the many themes explored in the Gallery’s newest exhibition, Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation.
Commentary

The Lines That Are Left
Of landscape itself as artefact and artifice; as the ground for the inscribing hand of culture and technology; as no clean slate.
— Joanna Paul
The residential Red Zone is mostly green. After each house is demolished, contractors sweep up what is left, cover the section with a layer of soil and plant grass seed. Almost overnight, driveway, yard, porch, garage, shed and house become a little paddock; the border of plants and trees outlining it the only remaining sign that there was once a house there.
Artist Profile

Doris Lusk: An Inventive Eye
In the strange, stunned afterlife that ticked slowly by in the first few years following Christchurch’s February 2011 earthquake, a curious note of recognition sounded through the shock and loss. As a massive programme of demolitions relentlessly hollowed out the city, many buildings were incompletely removed and lingered on for months as melancholy remains – stumps abandoned in a forlorn urban forest. Hideous, sculptural, beautiful; they bore compelling resemblance to a body of paintings created in the city more than three decades earlier.
Exhibition
Fiona Pardington: A Beautiful Hesitation
A survey exhibition by a leading New Zealand photographer explores sex, death and the female gaze.
Exhibition
Max Hailstone: Te Ara Takahaka Tapuae / Points of Reference
An exhibition of Max Hailstone's most controversial and important series, using the signatures of the rangatira (Māori chiefs) who signed New Zealand's Treaty of Waitangi in 1840
My Favourite

Selwyn Toogood, Levin
I spent much of my adolescence in hospital, confined to bed due to a chronic illness. With a 14" TV beside me, I’d travel to imaginary places via the controller of my Nintendo games console. At the time, I couldn’t imagine walking to the letterbox, let alone experiencing the more exotic places of the world.
Exhibition
Beasts
A generous, multimedia selection of animal-themed works, both lively and thoughtful.
Exhibition
Te Rua o te Moko
Each of the eighteen rūnanga within Ngāi Tahu are represented here by a work of art depicting a significant land site.
Exhibition
Kā Honoka
Cross-cultural encounter in the Pacific shows whaling as central to the local story.
Article

Taryn Simon's known unknowns
In 2003, the American photographer Taryn Simon embarked upon a four-year heart-of-darkness journey. In response to paranoid rumours of WMDs and secret sites in Iraq, she turned her gaze to places and things hidden within her own country.