T J McNamara: Faces tell their stories

This week you can come face to face with the living and the dead. The dead are represented in the powerful exhibition of photographs by the Japanese-American photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, at the New Gallery until November 10.

Photographs are inextricably linked with death. We look at old photographs and are aware everyone documented in them is dead. Sugimoto's photos, on loan from Berlin's Deutsche Guggenheim, which commissioned them, add several more levels of presence and meaning to the documentary function.

The images are of prominent people, most long dead, who had their portraits painted in their lifetime. A painting is a painting - we never mistake it for the living person. But these people look almost alive.

Portraits are used, notably by Madame Tussaud's, as models for wax sculptures which can be clothed to give a semblance of life.

Then along comes Sugimoto, who drops a black backdrop behind the waxwork statue, takes a photograph and makes a big, superbly detailed gelatin silver print that is at least life-size and often larger.

Because the prints are black and white they keep the documentary quality and connect us with the past startlingly.

The most fascinating of these recreations of recreations is the room devoted to Henry VIII and his six wives. Henry stands big and forthright, codpiece and all, just as Holbein painted him, the consummate king, composer, wrestler and autocrat.

Round him are ranked the ageing Catherine of Aragon, pretty Anne Boleyn with the long, slender neck, doomed to die, Jane Seymour, dead in childbirth, Anne of Cleves, Catherine Howard, executed for infringing the King's property rights by being unchaste before marriage, and Catherine Parr, who survived him.

These are excellent photographs of good waxworks - but where is Sugimoto's art? It lies in the lighting and the angle from which the photograph is taken, and his ability to confer considerable presence. We look upward at doomed Anne Boleyn; the cap on her head is a halo of pearls, highlighted, as is her pearl necklace. Pearls are big with dead women.

Fascinatingly, in another room, Princess Diana stands looking down on us, a quizzical expression on her face. The photograph is a wonderful composition. A white top stands out against her black skirt and the black background. The hem of her top is all embroidered with pearls, her neckline is all pearls and she has pearl earrings.

The photograph is sharp enough to enable us to take in all the detail of the tangled ruching on her top - as tangled as her life.

Sugimoto does not always bring it off. The portrait of the Duke of Wellington is taken from an angle to give an arrogant tilt to the head. The image, all braid and medals, is taken from a painting by Sir Thomas Lawrence. The duke was always direct and straight and the original waxwork might have better used the portrait by Goya than Lawrence's dignification, so Sugimoto has compounded the misinterpretation.

Most of the rest of the pictures are more compelling. Churchill may be excessively benign but Benjamin Franklin is the essence of 18th-century philosopher. The emphasis on Henry V's mailed fist is a telling detail.

The show contains two recreations of works of art - a huge piece dominating one wall records a tableau made for a Japanese waxwork museum of Leonardo's Last Supper without the perspective setting. Sugimoto has emphasised some extraordinary details not present in the Leonardo, such as a huge hunting knife which quite conceals Judas' bag of silver. Did the modellers identify the wrong apostle as Judas?

Touches like this make us aware these works discuss how we view the past. These photographs comment not only on people but also on the art of depiction. They are full of ambiguities.

Nowhere are these planes of reality more apparent than in the loveliest work in the show, a reconstruction of Vermeer's quiet painting The Music Lesson.

And the living? At Lopdell House in Titirangi, 24 vividly coloured paintings record with great exactitude the features of New Zealand writers, all, with one exception, still living. The exhibition by Glenda Randerson, The Face of the Writer (until October 6), is a grand achievement at a time when portrait painting is not much regarded.

These excellent likenesses have a great diversity of pose, costume and background, all related to the sitter's character. Some of them contain art works in the background to emphasise the links between poetry and art. Notable in this way is the portrait of Bill Manhire with a Hotere painting behind him.

It makes a colourful record of New Zealand writers even if they are all presented as tidy, bright-eyed, informal, heroic liberals.

A little touch of Goya here and there might have broken the spell of uniform pleasantry.