Give it your best shot

NIGEL GEARING surveys what's on offer in Auckland's first Festival of Photography



Auckland's first Festival of Photography showcases more than 70 photographers' work at venues as varied as Avondale Racecourse and Waiheke's Community Art Gallery. Creative Exposure also invites Aucklanders to capture their city on Photo Day, June 12, the results of which will be later displayed online.

Photographer and film-maker Julia Durkin came up with the idea after researching international photography festivals.

"Creative Exposure provides a platform for enjoying one of our most accessible and democratic art forms," she says. "This is a brand new annual community event with the potential to build new audiences for photography as an art form or a recreational activity."

The festival encompasses 10 events and exhibitions.

Linda Hickman's eight-piece A Bit Of A Do, on show at Avondale Racecourse, shows the interactions of Auckland's different cultures. One image, of a dancer at this year's Chinese New Year celebrations, complements Edwina Hopwood's photo of the Lantern Festival caught alongside the Sky Tower. Tanmoy Das' shot of a Punjabi Sikh wedding shows two newlyweds trying to retrieve their wedding ring hidden in a pot of warm milk.

Auckland City Photo Day is when Aucklanders get the chance to capture their city photographically. Images need to be submitted as prints or in digital form to Auckland City Event Promotions by June 18.

Selected images will be displayed on a specially created webpage via www.aucklandcity.govt.nz.

Nothing Is Separate is an online exhibition that grew from a workshop designed to produce a photo essay on Auckland. Curator Iphigenia Amoutzias says all photographers involved concluded that all of their images were connected.

"Each photograph examines the connections between people and their environment," she says. Her images of multicultural couples reflect her own upbringing - her father is Greek, her mother German. Other subjects in Nothing Is Separate include Devonport ferries, Te Orakei Marae and a park under construction.

Sexuality and gender are explored by photographer Rebecca Swan and painters Mary McIntyre, John Oxburgh and Don Papas in an exhibition called Desire.

Swan's work has been exhibited internationally. She was involved in the M.I.L.K project and her first book The Big C was widely acclaimed. Her large photographic mural, Jen, combines sensuous feminine curves with the more masculine fist.

"I attempted to place these images somewhere other than within existing categories of erotica or pornography but recognise they will be read differently by different audiences, depending on their sexuality," she says.

Urban photographers present their perspectives of country landscape in Dislocated. Curator Jessica Reid got the idea for the exhibition of Elam Art School students' work from Katrina McAbe's photographs.

"They subvert the received view of rural landscapes, rendering them as interactive, economic environments," Reid says.

Landscape and Memory presents three inter-related but distinct exhibitions. The title exhibition features images of southern landscapes taken by Gilbert van Reenen who works with archival pigment prints using a textured surface. He explores how our perceptions and memories of familiar locations can be affected by prevailing light and weather conditions. He suggests there may be a genetic basis for appreciating particular landscapes, particularly those in Central Otago which are some of the oldest intact landscapes in New Zealand.

The Three Kings 2003 exhibition is Wayne Wilson's 38-image essay of Auckland suburbia's night-time beauty.

And in Get the Picture, Waiheke Community Art Gallery has given 40 participants a disposable camera and the brief: to capture moments, places or people that show why Auckland is a desirable city.

Once participants have completed their film, the gallery will display one image from each person. These will be sold during the exhibition and the proceeds used for the gallery.

The New Zealand Idle exhibition will illustrate the commercial and political effects of photography in the media. Possible subjects include everything from body image to the cult of the metro and retro-sexual and questionable architecture.

John McDermott has eight images of AK03 performers who make the viewer use their imagination in his exhibition The Great Escape.

"My initial purpose was to document and establish an archive for AK03," McDermott says. "In amongst all the photography was something more ethereal. With ethereal images you end up with something that looks unreal but, if you get it right, is the most real representation."

Photographs by one of New Zealand's most revered photographers, Marti Friedlander, comprise the Winter Exhibition at FhE Gallery on Kitchener St throughout June and July.

* A Bit Of A Do: Avondale Racecourse, June 12-20

Auckland City Photo Day, June 12

Desire, Ardour, June 19-July 1

Dislocated, George Fraser Gallery, June 8-26

Landscape and Memory, Waiheke Art Gallery, June 4-24

NZ Idle, BNZ Foyer, Aotea Centre, June 20-27

Nothing Is Separate www.photoforum-nz.org

The Great Escape, Aotea Gallery, June 7-28

Winter Exhibition, FhE Gallery, June-July

Wonder, Artstation, June 22-July 3


EXHIBITIONS

*What: Creative Exposure: The Auckland Festival of Photography

*Where and when: Selected venues around Auckland, June 6-27