‘Gaze upon these works spread out for us, treasured images to be enjoyed by generations yet to come.” So begins a translated version of Emeritus Professor Ngahuia te Awekotuku’s te reo foreword to this magnificent survey of photographer Mark Adams’ 50-year career, companion to a major exhibition at Auckland Art Gallery.
Before opening the pages, gaze upon the cover, wrapped in a striking photo sleeve of the Toot & Whistle Steam Railway in Kuirau Park, Rotorua, which Adams shot in 1986 (or 09.06.1986; his works are precisely annotated). Look closely and see a Rotorua where culture was appropriated for a tacky tourist attraction, the wheku (face) mounted above miniature rail lines flanked by geothermal steam and a ring of tyres. It’s a melancholy fragment of history. The miniature trains sounded their final toot 20 years ago.
Inside, the book is divided into 10 sections depicting stages of Adams’ work, which intertwine and weave together. As an introduction, there’s a great deal to learn from a comprehensive essay by Sarah Farrar, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki’s head of curatorial and learning. She opens in the year 2000, when Adams was in Greenwich, London, in the middle of a five-year project documenting sites Captain James Cook visited during his three voyages to the Pacific and Aotearoa in the late-18th century.
Greenwich, location of the zero meridian and the birthplace of international standardised time-keeping and navigational measurements fundamental to the expansion of the British Empire, was the carefully considered subject of Adams’ 10-panel panorama: 18.12.2000. O degrees. Greenwich Park. Greenwich. London. England.
The panorama is reproduced in small form across the pages of Farrar’s analysis of the implications of that day in Greenwich, and again in a four-page foldout in the “Cook’s sites” section. Farrar writes, “What did Greenwich represent to Adams?” Adams’ “Cook’s sites”, made in collaboration with his great friend, Australian anthropologist Nicholas Thomas, represent important aspects of his career. But there are so many.
Te Awekotuku describes the photographer as “a self-deprecating and gentle fellow who seemed to fit or fade into the background”, confirmed by the book’s bare-bones biographical details.
He was born in Christchurch in 1949 and became fascinated by Māori culture at an early age through stories about his great-great-grandfather, James Pope, a school inspector in the 1880s who spoke fluent te reo and earned the name Te Popi.
One year into his fine arts degree at Canterbury University, Adams “woke up one morning and had to choose between painting and sculpture … I decided I wanted to do photography. I had no idea why”.
Largely self-taught, Adams learnt how to use the art school’s 4 x 5-inch Linhof plate camera, a technology he retains using large-format 8 x 10 negatives which give a remarkable quality of depth and detail.
“When you use a big camera and … sheet film, you actually don’t take many photographs. You edit everything in your head as you go. I love the way it slowed you down and made you consider, very carefully, the sort of photographs you were taking and their formal qualities.”
Adams is especially well known for his 36-year body of work documenting Samoan tatau, sometimes accompanied by his friend, artist Tony Fomison, who underwent the tattooing.
Adams’ access to this gruelling process, which took him into many homes across the Auckland region, created his sense that context – what was around the subject – enriched his work. It also “crystallised an awareness” that, as a Pākehā, “he was the foreigner in that moment … Adams recognised Aotearoa’s position in the Pacific”.
Adams had already decided he wanted to be “the Burton Brothers in reverse”, referring to “the innate voyeurism” of many colonial-era photographers.
The book’s “Early work” section (1970-1988) covers a formative period of exploration. He is quoted as saying: “I started photographing pā sites, churches or anything that was obviously visibly cross-cultural. Everything started to gel.”
Work flowed from the Rotorua region to treaty-signing sites, museums (in Aotearoa, Britain and Europe) and the South Island.
From 2000-09, Adams embarked on an extraordinary project photographing three whare whakairo (meeting houses) carved by Tene Waitere (1854-1931): Hinemihi, which survived the 1886 Tarawera eruption but was removed in 1892 to the estate of Clandon Park House in Surrey (and will be returned); Rauru, acquired by a German museum, now on display in Hamburg; and Te Tiki a Tamamutu, bought in 1886 by the Spa Hotel in Taupo, resplendent in Adams’ three-plate 2001 panorama with emerald-green carpet, couches and coffee tables.
The last words in this dazzling book should go to Nicholas Thomas. In a very amusing and affectionate afterword, Thomas, who was appointed director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2006, describes how he and Adams first bonded in 1993 over an interest in tracing “physical residues of Cook’s visit to Tamatea/Dusky Sound in March 1773″.
Two years later, they chartered a boat and Thomas found himself trying to scramble up a slippery bank with all the camera gear to get to the exact spot that one of Cook’s artists, William Hodges, had depicted in Cascade Cove, Dusky Bay, 1775. It showed a “native” standing on a rock in the freezing water.
“Mark paced up and down, looking this way and that. After quite an interval we gathered, balancing on mossy boulders in the stream. He extended his arm. ‘We need four shots,’ he said … This was a case of Mark’s sense of the necessity of context.”
