B.

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.

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 And one of the panes of glass had been replaced by red glass, which effectively turned the world outside into a negative.”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)

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.