In the footsteps of Captain Cook

Adams at work in Dusky Sound, Fiordland. Picture / Haru Shimeshima

In the mid-ground of Mark Adams' photograph of a site in Tahiti visited by Captain James Cook, a plastic water bottle lies discarded on the beach of Vaitepiha Bay, either washed up by the tide or dropped by someone visiting the memorial.

"It wouldn't stay there. The place is well looked after. Later in the day it would be cleaned up," says Adams.

But it was there when Adams set up his 8x10 inch camera on the site where Cook's artist, William Hodges, once painted, so it joins the historical narrative he is creating.

Adams' work spans decades - and now the globe - as he follows particular themes. His large prints usually hang in public galleries and museums. The latest exhibition, the inaugural show at Two Rooms in Newton, is only his third at a dealer gallery in more than a decade.

Adams says all his projects are about the same theme, whether it be his 30 years of photographing Polynesian tattooists, his recording of significant Ngai Tahu sites in the South Island, Rotorua's cross-cultural dimensions, or following the tracks of Cook.

"It's the bloody cross-cultural history of colonialism in the Pacific, what's going on here, now, how did that happen, what does it mean," he says.

"It's a self-conscious engagement with the histories of conflict and also with the resistances and accommodations and other forms of representation, engaging with the colonial image bank."

That means going to places like Tahiti and Dusky Sound, finding the scenes that Cook's artists depicted, and addressing how Europeans represented things.

"That includes 19th-century ethnographic photography, the way that fed into the birth of modernism, the whole European interest in what they call primitivism," Adams says.

At Dusky Sound in Fiordland, Adams shot from the scene where Hodges would have painted a family standing by a rock on the water's edge.

He then set up the tripod on the rock itself, and created a 360 degree panorama.

Hodge's painting of Vaitepiha Bay hangs in Britain's National Maritime Museum, at Greenwich, next to the Royal Observatory. Adams created another panorama at Greenwich of the Christopher Wren-designed buildings sitting in their parkland. It's a place he wanted to visit.

"I wondered what it would be like, knowing certain things about it.

"It's a European space, connected in various ways to ours."

Another connected space is a museum in Whitby in the home of John Walker, the Quaker shipping merchant with whom Cook boarded while he was an apprentice seaman. Adams shot the dinner table, a gothic and surreal vista of wax food and drink.

"Gothic is the right word. On the hill above are the ruins of Whitby Abbey, which is what Bram Stoker was looking at when he was staying on the other side of the harbour writing Dracula," says Adams.

The Ngai Tahu sites was another project started from the politics of the 1970s.

"I had been living in Northland and involved in the protests at Waitangi and so on, and I wanted to bring that back home, so I started looking at the cross-cultural landscape of the south. Those are about very specific South Island places to do with the origins of the claim."

One image of the north bank where the Waitaki River meets the sea is of one of the oldest-known occupation sites in the country, where moa hunters maintained a large encampment.

Later it was where Te Maiharoa started his campaign of resistance to his people's landlessness, leading a heke to occupy land at Omarama, which was being squatted on by settlers. "It was so very loaded, to me it seems a crucial place."

Cross-cultural discourse and post-colonial discourse have been feeding into contemporary art for a while, with varying results.

"A lot of people working in various media have moved in, but they have not paid any dues. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. There is a lot of bad imagery around," says Adams.

He has the image-making process to ground him. "These are photographs. They are the highest possible resolution you can make on this planet on sheets of 10 by 8 film."

There is also dealing with "the entire cross cultural mess that we live with".

Two Rooms Gallery is a new venture by Jenny Todd, who ran the Jenny Todd Gallery in Notting Hill, London, for more than a decade.

Todd says as well as New Zealand artists she will show some of the European artists she represented in London, and host artists in residence.

In the upstairs gallery are works on paper by respected British abstract painter Basil Beattie.

* What: New work, by Mark Adams

* Where and when: Two Rooms, 16 Putiki St, Newton, to Sep 2