The Galleries: Gamut of emotions captured

Roland Fischer's LA Portrait #33.

An expensive nudge from the huge world art industry is at the Gow Langsford Gallery. It is a show of five photographs by two celebrated German photographers, part of the city-wide Festival of Photography which fills many galleries this week.

The artists are Roland Fischer and Thomas Ruff, whose work can be seen until July 1.

These artists concentrate on one effect and one style. Fischer's three works are portraits of young Los Angeles women who give the impression of working on the edge of the film industry. Their faces are mask-like, heavily made up. Their pale faces and shoulders are posed against a translucent blue.

This blue background doesn't have the light of the sky and yet it has an even, absorbent quality. Close observation shows that the women are immersed in a pool. Only around their shoulders is the blue revealed as a liquid. The effect is striking.

Two of these anonymous women are lit from directly in front. The one in the centre, LA Portrait 33, is lit slightly from the side.

The prints are huge and what they convey is that these people, just on the edge of being beautiful, are isolated, valued only for their faces and for the things that can be printed on them. They are effectively, powerfully and stylishly established as minor goddesses in a 21st-century pantheon.

The sheer size of Ruff's two portraits gives them an imposing presence.

So what is the value of a big colour photograph of someone we don't know? The size and clarity of detail emphasise the absolute individuality of these two conventionally handsome people. It emphasises that although there are only a few details to work with - eyes, nose, mouth and chin - these elements that we all have combine for an infinite variety of faces.

There is a sadness about the most fixed cheerful or handsome of photographs. The image never changes, except perhaps to yellow around the edges, but we know that the person continued to change until death intervened.

The collection of photographs next door at the John Leech Gallery emphasises time and the past. The exhibition, called Out of Time: Maori and the Photographer (until July 1) has come from the Ngawini Cooper Trust Collection and is packed with interest - personal, tribal, historical, anthropological and philosophical.

There are nearly 80 photographs and often they point to the grim reality that made Charles Goldie paint such people as a dying race. Among so many prints it is difficult to particularise but those that show the interaction with Britain in the person of Maori visiting England are fascinating, as is a marvellous photograph of Whakarewarewa in Rotorua as it was in 1890, with a rugby team posing proudly in the foreground.

Another different sort of history prompts the amusing faces that make up Salty Yarns of the Sea, an exhibition by Gavin Hurley at the Anna Bibby Gallery until July 1.

These stylised portraits present a witty view of the 18th century. They are a masquerade emphasised by a little collage called Going Pirate, where a pirate is making-up in front of mirrors and deciding how he will wear his eye-patch.

This sense of playing a part is further emphasised in the Little Buccaneer, with a curling moustache and Van Dyke beard.

A brooding portrait of Captain Cook, called My Sad Captain, bears a big modern label that says CAPTAIN. This painting works well - except for the heavy outline of the nose - because under its stylisation, which makes something of an icon of it, there is a sense of emotion.

In his previous work Hurley was very good at this, suggesting depths under the commonplace, depths such as the obscured guilt of churchgoing boys. But in shifting his method to the 18th century he loses that sense of guilt behind the eyes

Interestingly, the collages that accompany the exhibition are just little mind games. One called Muvver's Pretty Boy is cleverly ironic and, in its tiny way, it neatly completes a week of faces that began on a grand scale.