Glenn Busch, Bruce Connew & others: My Place

Remember when portrait photos celebrated the glamorous and gorgeous? When getting your picture in a book required the profile of Grace Kelly, the living room of John Paul Getty, the pedigree of Tsar Nicholas?

The pendulum swings. The wheel comes half-circle. Photographic studies now want the ordinary person — not that anyone has ever identified that chimera. And so it is with this handsome collection.

The text by Glenn Busch, the 144 black and white shots by Bruce Connew and others, the transcripts of subjects' own comments are parts of The Place in Time, a project by Canterbury University's School of Fine Arts which aims to acknowledge how "together with a sense of social responsibility, self-awareness is perhaps the most valuable asset a people can possess".

Be rather afraid when any writer puts "a people ... social responsibility ... self-awareness" in the same sentence. But the rest of Busch's comments are apposite and succinct, and the photos themselves are crackers — although the number of lived-in faces and forms could provide an entire series of Nip/Tuck.

There is nobody famous here, though a few rellies have been. There's a diversity of cultures. As the title indicates, people are photographed in, and talk about, where they belong or belonged, what a house or garden or cafe or country or prison means to them.

Mostly they are natural. A few times they posture. A number appear to have been photographed squinting at the world through one eye, but they are from Canterbury, after all.

The images range from a pre-teen dancer to an octogenarian farmer. There's an Indian restaurateur, a shoe fetishist, Elsie Locke's granddaughter, a priest's daughter, a video store worker-cum-linguistics student.

They remember or honour the corner dairy, the local Lover's Leap, the birth of their child. Their places include a rockface, a daughter's grave, a corner drain and lamp post, the RSA with its affecting photos and awful carpet, a Buddhist monastery, the Academy of Combat.

The shots capture the moment rather than arrange it. The more consciously composed images tend to be the least successful — you may wish to submerge the lady rhapsodising in her outdoor bath, and snatch the fag from the real estate agent's lips.

Many of the photographs have the quietly rich chiaroscuro that black-and-white seems to give. There is a glorious scene of mother and daughter on a lawn; memorable glimpses of a beer and Botticelli, Madeline jumping from the jetty, an elderly model-boat fan bow-legging along.

To judge from My Place, we're gritty, we're diverse, we're good storytellers (when edited), we're probably less likeable than the text suggests. And we are well worth looking at.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.

* Canterbury University Press, $29.95