A lens on life

Entrance (Jake) Go Alone Or Stay At Home, 2008. Photo / Supplied

Since the inception of photography, photographers have had a battle on their hands. It has long been questioned as a legitimate art form, challenged for its reliance on technical skills, doubted that it would ever be taken as seriously as, say, painting. But even as the ubiquity of photography grows, through magazines, online and mobile phones, so too has our appreciation for a great image.

In New Zealand, many of our top photographers - Deborah Smith, Patrick Reynolds, Charles Howells - studied at the University of Auckland's Elam Art School. In 2006, Elam student Adam Obradovic was one of seven finalists from around the world in the Microsoft Future Pro Photographer Competition, which received entries from 13,500 contestants worldwide.

Now a new generation of talent is emerging. Elam photography teacher Megan Jenkinson says that's in part thanks to the school's ability to "foster resilience and encourage individuality". Students are not only expected to produce a large volume of original work but to embrace any means in which to exhibit, explore and network with their peers in the art world. Many students set up artist spaces or use the university's George Fraser Gallery as a stepping stone to larger exhibitions.

Others go on to teach or gain commercial work in fashion and the media. We profile four emerging photographers worth keeping an eye on.

James Lowe

A body lies sprawled on concrete against a bright suburban sky. A girl jams a knife in a toaster, popping fur-trimmed toast. A pretty teen sits on the edge of a roof, peering down at the ground. Perhaps it's the subjects' expressions or the cinematic quality that makes the anticipation within these images even more unsettling.

While knees might jerk to James Lowe's shocking images, the 20-year-old says he doesn't like to take his art too seriously. His Elam supervisor, Richard Orjis, is also careful not to impose limitations on his student, suggesting his work may be symptomatic of anxieties that have nothing to do with suicide. Check out Lowe's series, Don't Cry, Death Defy, if you don't believe him.

A parody of Evel Knievel, the series features Lowe pimped out in domestic, stuntman glory, including one image in which the artist takes a ride on the "broom of death". "I'm interested in the potential of human beings and what the mind's able to perceive," Lowe explains. "Human boundaries, what we create for ourselves."

Although his themes are dark and playfully perilous, there's an ironic twist to his work, an edge that suggests the subjects aren't depressed about going through with "the transition from the physical world to the spiritual realm". Perhaps it's their deliberately staged nature and dramatic potency, a nod to Lowe's equally shocking idol, Australian photographer, Bill Henson. Maybe it's something to do with Lowe's obsession with the Sofia Coppola film, The Virgin Suicides. "Whatever I watch at the time heavily influences what I do."

In person, Lowe is gentle and quietly mannered but behind the lens he might as well be Steven Spielberg. For Entrance, from his biggest shoot, he not only roped in friends and arranged to use a mate's house, he brought in a generator, towed in by a truck, to power the lights. He's also been known to rise at 4am to capture the right light. For an experimental beach scene he hired a strobe light to create a dreamlike quality as he snapped a friend falling backwards on to sand. He hopes that the parents of his friend whose backyard he dug up to make a grave have forgiven him.

Not surprisingly, Lowe's biggest passion is lighting - or more accurately, lack of it. Many of his subjects burst from the blackness like beacons. There's a cinematic, almost David Lynch quality about his photographs, particularly Diana and Daisy, featuring a mother and daughter driving in a car that exists to the viewer only in beams of light that reflect off its panels.

The light is even more carefully used in the steamy Entrance, and the hilarious Humidermy, Lowe's series featuring stuffed animal portraits juxtaposed with supposedly stuffed humans. If his professionalism appears to be beyond his years, so too does his equipment. Lowe prefers to shoot the old-fashioned way, using a large format camera (think man behind black curtain, smile for the birdy, etc), the early machines used by portrait photographers at the turn of the century. He only gets one image per film but prefers the results for their impressive size and depth.

Even more impressive, Lowe started taking photos only five years ago - he's now in his final year at Elam, where his grandfather also studied. Next he hopes to become a Master of Fine Arts abroad. So far his commercial work extends to hairdressing and fashion photography, and providing the stills for a local roller derby film by Monica de Alwis. He hopes to continue as a fashion photographer but only to pay the bills. What he'd really like is to be a full-time artist.

Richard Orjis

As a teen, Richard Orjis was obsessed with international magazines, The Face, Dazed and Confused, ID. With their subversive fashion shoots and taboo-busting imagery, they were more relevant to Orjis than anything an art gallery could offer. Now 29, not much has changed. "I love that photography is so democratic," he says, over a coffee and a squiz at the latest issue of ID.

"Most people own a camera. Your life is surrounded by photographs. I quite often prefer to read magazines than go to a gallery. There can't be hierarchy within creativity. Some of my favourite images are ads."

Orjis' own work is just as broad in that it straddles the line between fine art and popular culture. He embraces that which makes art commercial and vice-versa. There have been times when his magazine fashion shoots have gone on to be exhibited in galleries. "Fashion images talk just as much about our society as art does. The nice thing about art is that images are given respect and people will write and talk about them and live with them in their houses and treasure them. Whereas a magazine might be treasured by a teenager who sticks it on the wall for two years before it's thrown away."

Orjis didn't own a camera until he was 21 but he's made good use of it since. After getting his degree in fine arts at AUT and doing an exchange to Pittsburgh, he moved to New York. During his three years there he lived and worked with then-partner and fellow photographer Anthony Goicolea, known for producing sexually provocative images, and undertook a coveted internship with surrealist photographer and film-maker David LaChappelle. The experience encouraged his eye for beauty undercut with violence, glamour mixed with the grotesque. After dabbling in art and party photography, he returned to do his Masters of Fine Arts at Elam.

Orjis has exhibited in New Zealand, the United States and Spain, where he did an exchange year during his teens. He now teaches part-time at Manukau School of Visual Arts. He experienced somewhat of an artistic epiphany when Marcel Duchamp put a urinal in an art gallery "and suddenly, it's this thing where art can be anything". While not ablution-inspired, Orjis' most memorable images are those confronting "taboos" of sex and death, and often with the amusing aid of botany. Orjis looks for the flaws in beauty, bringing a dark sense of humour to his work, smothering his subjects in mud and exotic flowers, some vaguely sexual, a la Judy Chicago's surreptitious use of the orchid. They also suggest cultural ritual, or lack of it as the case may be for Pakeha.

"There's a cult thing," Orjis explains. "I've always been interested in blurring fact and fiction and I think photography does that really well." While some of his edgier works are evidence of rebellion against his upbringing as a Roman Catholic, others are directly inspired by it, the clash between a beautiful image and that of pain and suffering. "It's the idea of attraction as well. I'm really interested in the idea of beauty in the work, the clash between beauty and violence. I once heard a quote: 'Beauty without pain is just pretty'.

What is beauty? I like the idea that things that are beautiful have something that is a little bit hard about them. "The real world can't be perfect, so if you see an image that's hyper-real or artificial, somehow it talks about something imperfect or wrong. It's a facade for something. When you watch a movie if someone is so nice, they seem two-dimensional. But they have a quality about them that they can either be really mean and horrible but endearing. It's the same in art."

Shannon Teao

Spare a thought for Shannon Teao's new wife. In his tongue-in-cheek homage to 1960s family portraits, Teao poses with his future offspring, models with his face superimposed to look something like his kids might one day.

The effect is reminiscent of old Chinese posters depicting optimistic workers in the fields but the setting is New Zealand state housing. Considering one of the pictures is hanging in their living room, Mrs Teao can't mind his imaginary whanau too much. "Maybe the child is me or maybe the father is me," says Teao. "Maybe this whole thing is me. I was teetering on either side of disgusting and something really beautiful. At the time I was really interested in finding a place where I could stand on that knife edge because I think it's subjective.

People make up their own minds about these things." Teao was working on a film about his mother when he started to ponder how images of families are constructed, "the fact that these will be here when I'm gone and members of my family who don't know me now will have this image". It's no coincidence his photography deals with familial roots, nor is it by chance that Auckland appears in many of his images. Teao grew up in Sydney and since his Kiwi father's death when he was a boy, he'd dreamed about moving to New Zealand to learn more about that side of the family.

Prior to his studies at Elam he did his OE in Britain, and met his future wife, a Kiwi, in Scotland. They moved together to Auckland, "one of the best moves of my life". He often wanders around Auckland taking snaps when something inspires him. These photographs often inform future works, such as the panelled fence that reminded him of Colin McCahon's work, which he later transformed into a painting of his own. Other images capture the ephemeral nature of urban Auckland.

Teao had for a long time spied a big, blue wall that struck him as a landscape painting of its own; one day he stopped to "graffiti" it in chalk with the word ILAND. Against a Pacific backdrop of palms and ocean, the misspelt word takes on several new meanings, and if nothing else, leads the viewer to pay attention to it. "I was looking at a lot of New Zealand art history. This is the real world to me. It's all within walking distance of my house. The architecture around you soaks into your skin and helps you form some kind of perception of yourself." Art has always been a part of 30-year-old Teao's life.

A keen sculptor and painter, it wasn't until he went to Elam and was required to document his sculptural work, he began to take photography - or as he calls it, "sculptography" - seriously. His interdisciplinary approach also extends to film and collage. He has exhibited at High Tide Gallery and George Fraser Gallery. His abstract collages are also produced quickly, without an iota of preciousness, lest that detract from their spontaneity. Paint drips leave psychedelic swirls on black and white photographs; drawings of lips and teeth appear incongruously on floral backdrops.

Teao envisaged them as record covers. "They're just another way that I try and let whatever's out there soak in then just spit it back out. These are what you get. I'm not sure what they mean and I don't think that's the point. I'm not really trying to solve anything but if I can come up with some interesting questions, I think that's just as productive." When he's not writing on walls or windows - "I don't normally do graffiti. I don't condone that kind of action," he laughs - he's busy working on a small publication and doing the odd teaching job. "I try and juggle income earning alongside my practice. I consider myself primarily an artist."

Robyn Hoonhout

Most of us like to think we'll live to a ripe old age. But if we get there, will we still be considered, well, ripe? Will we even be considered? In Robyn Hoonhout's series, The Politics of Old Age, the 48-year-old former nurse addresses these issues via stills of elderly female subjects, one of them her 77-year-old mother, June. In one shot, June is photographed from behind, clad in a slinky slip and kitten heels, a large portion of skin on show. Another shows her pulling on or off a youthful, multicoloured kaftan, her age indiscernible.

But perhaps Hoonhout's most compelling images feature June in a fur stole, alongside another of an empty chair draped with the same garment, sensual yet vulnerable images that suggest the solitary nature of ageing. "I think there's a lot of stereotyping and prejudice against the elderly," says Hoonhout. "As a society, we tend to construct the identity of a person."

Concerned that the elderly are largely ignored in mainstream advertising - save for the odd promotion for retirement homes or healthcare products - Hoonhout set out to capture the elderly as they saw themselves, asking her subjects to bring along props of their choosing to best express their individuality and power. "They're no longer their husband's wife or their children's mother. They actually have their own identity. So they're less concerned about what other people read into them." Mounted on backlit billboards, the surprising images subvert the notion of fashion advertising and create a sculptural, three-dimensional effect that leaps out of the frame.

Last year, the advertising company Adshel sponsored Hoonhout to photograph the elderly for use in bus shelters, to help raise visibility for older people. If treating your mother as "elderly" rather than simply a "person" sounds a challenge, Hoonhout says June couldn't be more supportive of her endeavours. She's had lots of positive reinforcement from the elderly community that her work resounds outside the art world too. She's now working on a book with acclaimed local novelist and poet Stephanie Johnson, another product of her Politics series. "You end up working with people in an intimate way, you're a lot closer and it's a lot more of a collaborative process. You do need a lot of trust. So I do find I start working with the same people." A quick look around Hoonhout's Mt Eden home reveals all facets of her life are incorporated into her art.

After her nursing days, during which she worked extensively with elderly people, Hoonhout progressed to marketing. She now works part-time and says her billboards are a way of combining her two careers. She has always been drawn to the worlds of advertising and fashion, which not only explains the light boxes but the copious photographs of mannequins, and the shabby-chic glamour of her art-choked villa. In fact her walls are practically groaning with art and it's clear from the number of pets - the dog, chickens and huge aquarium - that Hoonhout isn't just a people person.

"That's definitely influenced my work, the compassionate side." Hoonhout's artistic career had always bubbled away beneath her other pursuits, although it wasn't until she enrolled at Elam that her focus sharpened. Throwing herself into the stimulating support network art school offered, she decided she couldn't quite leave the "addictive" institution, and so went on to study her Masters in Fine Arts. She says she gets much of her talent from her grandfather, who was also an artist, and June, a painter.

"Ultimately it would be great to work full-time in the art environment, whether that's in teaching or a gallery, but with enough time to continue being a practising artist. The main thing I'd like is to continue making art."