Time to move on says photographer Ross T. Smith

Tired of the battle to win funding for his photography, Ross T. Smith tells KELLYANA MOREY he is turning his talent to film-making instead.

Photographer Ross T. Smith is giving up the medium in which he has made his name. Smith, best-known for his sensuous and confronting portraits of Hokianga residents, says he is frustrated with the New Zealand art world.

After failing to win support from Creative New Zealand in the past five annual funding rounds, he says it is time to move on: "I'm approaching 40 and I guess I don't want to end up an old man eating bread and jam."

This week Smith has three exhibitions: at the Lopdell House Gallery in Titirangi, at the Pataka Porirua Museum of Arts and Culture and at the gallery of his agent, Peter Hay Halpert Fine Art, New York.

But this might be it from Smith, who hopes to turn his talent to film-making. With French producer Francisco Gerson he has collaborated on a script based on an 18th-century French novel, setting the story in contemporary Otago and Paris.

Smith says the film has a budget of $10 million and has the backing of Swedish, French and local interests.

With the working title Immaculate Chaos, the story follows a young New Zealander who travels to Paris and encounters the demi-monde. "It's going to be erotically charged and sensual," he says.

That Smith has never worked in the film industry was not a hurdle. "France makes 180 features a year. They've seen my photographic work and know what I can do. They're prepared to let me try this."

Smith has been in Invercargill as the William Hodges Fellow this year and has been busy with new works, Stillness Falls Gradually and Your Mouth Is Stained with Sun. His 1998 installations, Hokianga and Hemi Tuwharerangi Paraha, continue to tour nationally and internationally.

Stillness Falls Gradually is showing at the Lopdell House Gallery. These photographs are about the safety of home, about people and the environments in which they anchor themselves, through family, through friends, through experiences shared. The intimacy that the photographic genre suggests and the passing of time through personal histories remains but the images contain layers of other realities.

Stillness Falls Gradually contains a menacing photograph of a little girl wearing a Batman hood and cape and nothing else. In an effort to forestall controversy Smith resolved that the image is not for sale. His concern is justified. This year in London American artist Tierney Gearon's photographs of her nude and masked children were removed from the Saatchi Gallery by the Scotland Yard Child Pornography squad, serving as a reminder that any suggestion of children and sexuality is always ruthlessly examined.

It may be the point that Smith is trying to make. In many ways the three photographs of the child are a self-portrait, as is the whole of Stillness Falls Gradually. As Smith says, only half-jokingly, "It's about me, dammit."

nteThe territories that Smith frames are emotional topographies that reject boundaries, borders and perceptions. These are maps that speak of constancy even as they move from the framed to the familiar in a single image.

The fading greens of remembered landscapes, the dignity of the human experience and the almost shocking bursts of colour, all are the rhythms of living that draw together the threads of Smith's work.

And they may be the last photographs we shall see from him.

"You can never say never. I love photography, which is why I've tried so hard to make a career out of it here. But in the end you have to move on," he says.