An eye for hidden lives

By T.J. McNAMARA

Art photographers face two problems. The first is that commercial photography - news, fashion, documentary - is so technically superb and brilliant in invention that the art photographer must find something very special to compete.

The second problem is that unlike painting, photography generally looks better in a book than in an exhibition on the walls of a gallery.

Often the answer to the first problem is to blur everything; out-of-focus and it's art. The answer to the second problem is to make big prints.

The retrospective exhibition by Anne Noble at the New Gallery (until the end of August) contains a little of both superficial answers to the problems, but it also has a third solution: an intensity of gaze that forces the viewer to take time to look.

Noble was early on the scene when photography began to gain recognition here in the 1980s. Her early work came from her roots. She was born in Wanganui and first came to prominence with photographs of the river.

That visual essay, from 1982, is fully represented in the exhibition and has stood the test of time well. There is some arty blurring, but there is also a deep concern for the spiritual power of light. One of the best pictures shows the river, burning and silver, between dark hills clad in barely perceptible bush but showing just enough ferns to make it unmistakably New Zealand.

Noble could do the instant, sharp capturing of a moment. An equally impressive picture shows two pigs on the river road, big, determined, and intent on some mission known only to themselves.

After these beginnings Noble became a courage-giver. She endeavoured to give a specifically female point of view and inspired a number of women photographers to follow.

In Night Hawk the woman's point of view is explicit. A penis is adorned with feathers which make it a kind of domestic raptor or, equally, a trophy and, even more explicitly, a photograph of lovers taken from a camera held below the breasts in the course of an act of love.

It would be easy to theorise about a feminist programme, but in truth the work gains status by a deep and meditative concern for human relationships independent of gender. This is particularly so in the Hidden Lives series, which concentrates on the domestic lives of intellectually disadvantaged people.

There are three groups of these and each is made up of a big photograph which confronts you in black and white with the physical actuality of the people involved and then smaller photographs of their daily activities.

These photographs are straightforward and would be prosaic if they were not accompanied by moving narratives written down from the characters' own voices.

This dependence on the written word for the full impact is redeemed by the touch of brilliance that photographs the mottos these people live by, stuck with magnets on their fridges, and their little scribbled reminder notes.

The most impressive of all of Noble's groups is the one she made when living In the Presence of Angels, among Benedictine nuns, an environment only a sympathetic Catholic woman could penetrate.

This essay provides the outstanding photographs in the show with the most telling details, which are a combination of piety and oddity, quiet and hidden passion. A nun all in black, lying prone to make her final profession, reveals the unworn tread on the bottom of her shoes. A nun kissing the cowl she must wear for prayer suggests extremes of devotion.

The single best photograph in the whole show is a place setting: a place at table for the photographer herself who has been admitted temporarily to the order. There is an immaculately white plate catching the light, a precisely cut piece of bread, a bowl, a dish and a jug. Its extreme stillness exquisitely suggests a life of devotion.

Anne Noble is frequently concerned not with an event but the things that remain after the event. The photographs in her series on Parihaka simply try too hard and need the explanation on the walls to have much meaning at all. An exception is a big, curious print that shows the labelling on rolls of historical negatives associated with Te Whiti.

Much more personal and moving are the prints made from bits and pieces collected while in convent school and rediscovered later in life. This delightful series includes everything from locks of hair to toilet paper. This work, harmonised by sepia colour and by using collections of holy cards, is a touching documentary of a special kind of innocence.

Huge, colourful prints of the photographer's daughter with her mouth luridly coloured by lollipops should make a blazing finish to the show, but for all their size they are an anti-climax, clever but not so deeply emotional as other work.

Then there is the final room about Noble's father's life and death. This, with the aid of video, crowds us into such close intimacy (children on the bed where the corpse is laid out) that the honesty almost becomes embarrassing.