Mark of a natural talent

By ADAM GIFFORD

When Mark Smith arrived back from Vietnam, he knew he had an exhibition in his bag.

While on assignment for Holiday magazine, Smith had wandered through the former home of Nguyen Van Thieu, South Vietnam's last president, which has been preserved by the communist regime as a sort of puppet museum.

The palace, with its faded 1970s trimmings, murals protected by red velvet guard ropes and gloomy spaces, reminded Smith of an abandoned theatre.

One room was dominated by a line of phones along a sideboard, each a direct line to some other important place.

"The picture doesn't look like much this size," he says, passing over an 20 x 25cm work print, "but blown up it has presence."

Smith's Vietnam pictures are on show at Artis Gallery in Parnell.

It is his first solo show in a mainstream dealer gallery, although he has been showing work in group shows and improvised settings around Auckland since 1986, when he left his job as trainee photographer for the Hawkes Bay Herald Tribune to work at artist-run photo processing company Real Pictures.

"I was there a couple of weeks when I was offered a job on the New Zealand Herald," says Smith, who jumped at the chance to finish his training among these pages.

In 1988 he moved to magazine work, shooting for the Auckland bureau of the Listener then freelancing through the 90s, mainly for Metro.

Along the way he lived in Barcelona for two years, and in the late 1990s he travelled with musician Neil Finn through the United States, ostensibly to nanny the youngest Finn child, with the trip resulting in the book Neil Finn - Once Removed.

In 2000, with sister Deborah Smith and friend Victoria Ferguson, he launched Cake, a project in which they turned their photos into posters to be stuck up around Auckland by professional poster stickers.

Smith says the title of the Artis show, Person, Place or Animal, reflects his key concerns.

"I am interested in how we archive things, how we reference storage," Smith says.

"I was going to do the show all about the palace, but that seemed banal, so I thought, why not include some portraits and some work I stumbled across at the Auckland Museum."

Most of Smith's earlier exhibitions have been of smaller black and white work - "I have been a believer in the small work you can hold in your hands" - but Person, Place or Animal consists of 11 images, 1100 by 830mm, enclosed in highly-polished black lacquer frames.

Smith says he used to scoff at the notion of the studio portrait, but now is drawn to the form, after realising how much he enjoyed photographing people.

"I am trying to do an archival record of the people of now."

Partly this comes from technological changes which mean we are losing the notion of the traditional photographic portrait, the black and white silver gelatine print on archival fibre paper.

"I love working with colour, but I love the fact old prints will hang around. No one knows how long these new colour processes will last.

"Think of all those 1970s family photos, which have gone yellow sitting in albums, their image fading."

He still works with film - usually Fuji or Agfa - in his camera, shying away from digital cameras.

Commercial photographers often seem uncomfortable when making the leap to art galleries, but painter and photographer John Reynolds says Smith has always had a foot in both camps.

Smith's first exhibition at Real Pictures was shared with Reynolds, who was making big colour pictures.

"It's funny how these things turn out," says Reynolds. "This show has been a long time coming. Mark has always been an avid recorder of experience, so it is no surprise he wants to find a wider audience."

Reynolds says Smith is a natural photographer.

"He doesn't struggle with the medium, he has a breezy second nature with it. A lot of photographers work against the medium - someone like Lawrence Aberhart seems at times almost at odds with the medium."

Reynolds believes the shift to colour work is a natural extension of taking photos while travelling.

"It's about being somewhere else, trying to record accurately and at the same time having the intensity and hypnosis of travel. Even then, Mark manages to give his images this quiet internal drama.

"The great thing about the show is he is including what aren't New Zealand images.

"There is a tremendously narrow view here about what New Zealand is and what New Zealandness is.

"Those issues have been to the fore in the past few elections about the nature of immigration and change," says Reynolds.

"New Zealanders are great travellers, but we can have a narrow view of the world."

Visual arts

*What: Person, Place or Animal, by Mark Smith

*Where and when: Artis, 280 Parnell Rd, to Oct 10