Fragments of history

LINDA HERRICK talks to Harvey Benge, a photographer whose latest work is made from the misplaced memories of a stranger.

Auckland photographer Harvey Benge laughs ruefully when he recalls the time he was asked by leading American photographer William Eggleston to describe his work. "We met in Paris and Bill asked, 'What are you doing now?' I said, 'I'm photographing urban social landscapes.' He said, 'Harvey, don't talk bullshit.' I will never say 'urban social landscape' to anyone again. I photograph strange stuff."

Strangely familiar stuff. Benge, a professional camera artist for a decade, has an eye for the bizarre elements of the banal, a gift for homing in on objects, places and people we may look at without seeing.

Benge's camera - "a very straightforward Nikon" - and his prints open eyes and spark imagination. Through books such as Four Parts Religion, Six Parts Sin, Vital Signs and Lucky Box: A Guide To Modern Living, Benge has been able to reach an international audience. He also exhibits in places as diverse as Paris (where he regularly bases himself for part of each year), London, Tel Aviv and Vienna.

Right now, though, his focus is on his latest exhibition in the NorthArt Community Arts Centre in Northcote, a space he likes for its airiness and the diversity of the people coming in to see the work.

A centrepiece of the exhibition is Benge's Aide-Memoire collection, taken from his book of the same name, which he describes as "a fragment of 20th-century European history".

The book (and the montage of photos on NorthArt's wall) tells a wordless story of a yacht, a seaside holiday, a boy and his grandparents. Aged typeface on the first page introduces the book as an "Aide-Memoire" for French infantry officers, issued by the Ministry of War in 1934. The hands of Benge's daughter Lucy turn the pages as the little boy appears next to diagrams of gasmasks, grenades, tanks and "outils de destruction". The resulting narrative is disturbing, wistful and mysterious.

"Aide-Memoire started when I was invited by [Paris-based artist] Christophe Boutin to do a book for his Onestar Press," explains Benge. "That coincided with me finding this memory aid for an infantry officer dated 1934 in the street in a pile of rubbish. Then at a flea market I found a little envelope with these photos of the boy and his family at the beach, dated 1932.

"I re-photographed them, made some out of focus and cropped them, then made laser prints to fit the size of the book. I pasted them in and photographed Lucy turning the pages. I've thought long and hard about who owned the book, for a start. It was just before the war and the Nazi occupation. Were they a Jewish family? Is the boy still alive? Superficially, this work is completely different from my other work, but fundamentally, it is very similar because it deals with the issue of parallel lives."

Elsewhere in the exhibition are highly colourful images of "strange stuff" from Tokyo, Barcelona, Prague, Auckland, Aix-en-Provence, which form part of what will be a larger show at the Dunedin City Art Gallery in July.

Before then, Benge travels to Memphis to work with Eggleston, "one of the photographers I most admire", then back to Paris to finalise details for a show at the Georges Dadoun Gallerie.

Benge acknowledges his path as an artist-photographer can be a hard and lonely one, because he has to spend so much time away from his family. But he loves what he does, "thinks about it all the time" - and perhaps helps us, the viewers, think a bit more about our world as well.

* Harvey Benge: Photographs, NorthArt, Northcote Shopping Centre, until April 21.