Photos by John McDermott: Barefoot Kings

Reviewed by RICHARD DALE

Nearly nine years after his Heartland book, and including some of those images, John McDermott has published this survey of his photographs. I thought that I would hate them, not being one for the collective myths of Kiwi blokes, No 8 wire and all that "good on yer, mate" stuff of New Zealand Pakeha nationhood. But they weren't that bad.

Okay, take away the obvious misty, moody, wispy landscape calendar shots a la Craig Potton School and the lone-figure-in-foreground-of-front-yard Robin Morrison lookalikes. What you are left with is an idiosyncratic view of New Zealand, a consistent vision that makes even Auckland look like a country town (the Hero Parade as stand-in for a local AMP show?).

The images I liked most are against the grain of the book, the close-cropped portraits, people shed of their context. The bandsman (depicted) is on the left side of one page, with a moko-patterned gang leader on the other. There is no suggestion that each is a representative of the People, because each sitter has such singular presence. We are able to focus on them without distraction and the surrounding clutter normally needed to signify local culture or place. The bandsman is posing, but is also captured in motion, is in time, you could say.

To place Maori and Pakeha side by side as a study in extremes seems a bit obvious, though, doesn't it? And this can happen in some of his images. His visual jokes can be just that, jokes. Deliberate obscuring devices, or quirky juxtapositions somehow make the images interesting.

At a stretch, you could almost take an anti-realist reading to a lot of McDermott's photographs. Bodies appear strangely cropped or caught in mid-flight. Pigs hang in space from the top of the frame, or replace a hunter's head. Some photographs are carnivalesque, or Fellini-like in their weirdness. He has several fine studies of the male torso that have a classical, almost Greek, beauty to them.

In an essay, Folklore, leading photographer Gavin Hipkins gave a trenchant critique of McDermott's type of photography - which can be called parochial pictorialism - and also this type of book. Hipkins argued that such publications are very much involved in ideology, in the construction of identity, of New Zealandness. The places are small town or rural. The people are common folk. The country is Godzone and the effect is nostalgia, a "loyalty to wholesome imagery".

Lloyd Jones' accompanying essay to Barefoot Kings reinforces the myth. Hipkins had his own response: "Kiwiana takes us back to a simpler time But if you never played with a Buzzy Bee or sailed a P-class yacht, you may feel excluded from something akin to a collective, but simultaneously personal memory."

Craig Potton Publishing $49.95

* Richard Dale is an independent art writer and curator.