Jane Ussher Opens Doors In Her New Book, Rooms

Get to know an 1852 waterfront Akaroa cottage resplendent in green in this extract from the leading photographer new book.

The things in a room, as Jane Ussher shows in her new book, are the means by which a space is claimed by its inhabitants.

The rooms Ussher photographs are manifestations of taste, at the very least, but often they seem more like exercises in self-definition.

In her interiors portraits, we don’t just see the things that people like to surround themselves with — furniture and fabrics, paintings and prints, books and ceramics, sculptures and curios, lights and mirrors — but we get the bigger picture of how they choose to present themselves.

Each room is a story, one that the inhabitants tell both to themselves and to the visitors they admit to their private domain.

To look at Ussher’s room portraits is to be drawn into a metaphysical guessing game: how much about people is revealed by photographs of their spaces without them?

Walter Benjamin was on the case of the tell-tale interior early on. Writing in the 1930s about Paris in the mid-19th century, Benjamin described one type of domestic environment, the bourgeois apartment, as “a sort of cockpit” in which “the traces of its inhabitants are moulded into the interior”.

This, thought Benjamin, “was the origin of the detective story, which inquires into and follows those traces”.

Shorn of its chalk-outline crime-scene connotations, this insight could be applied to Ussher’s interior photographs; they encourage their viewers to become armchair detectives. And even judges — it’s a quick leap from liking photographs of rooms to believing you would like the people who live in those rooms. Or not.

Ussher is not critical of the decorating styles or collecting habits of the owners of the rooms she photographs. As long as she is intrigued, she is engaged. Her practice has always been sustained by an open-minded inquisitiveness, and the curiosity that gets her through the door must disarm homeowners, just as it did her Listener portrait subjects.

“I’m constantly impressed, so I’m a good visitor,” she says. “I walk in, and it doesn’t matter whether I’ve got an interest in, say, lead soldiers. I’m just astonished that someone has collected so many of them.”

All the rooms Ussher portrays in this book have been curated carefully, whatever the provenance of their contents. Some interiors are the result of deliberate and expensive acquisition, and Ussher’s photographs could serve as a prospectus for the contemporary New Zealand art market.

Ralph Hotere, Bill Hammond and Michael Parekowhai are represented, unsurprisingly, and there’s work on the walls by Lisa Reihana, Yuki Kihara and Anne Noble.

But in other homes, whimsical accretion or arcane specialisation have yielded troves of religious icons and Orientalist lithographs, portico clocks and mannequin hands, mounted deer heads and flintlock muskets and, yes, squadrons of Napoleonic-era lead soldiers.

This is Wunderkammer territory, and contemplating some of the interiors can leave you as slack-jawed as the 17th century English diarist John Evelyn on the occasion of his visit to the home of polymath and collector Sir Thomas Browne: “His whole house and garden is a paradise and Cabinet of rarities and that of the best collection, amongst Medails, books, Plants, natural things.”

“I’m definitely drawn to people who are not following trends,” Ussher says. “I think the rooms I respond most to have a sense of history.”

The presence of the past is strongly evident in Ussher’s photographs of heritage houses, such as Mansion House on Kawau Island, from 1862 to 1888 a residence of Sir George Grey, governor and later premier of the colony of New Zealand.

“I can imagine Grey in some of the rooms in Mansion House — it doesn’t feel faux to me,” Ussher says.

“When I photograph historic properties, I choose only those places and spaces that seem real. I’ll ignore rooms that feel like a museum.”

Ussher’s journey through some of the nation’s most photogenic interiors has taken her into rooms with the visual calorie count of French haute cuisine; just looking at portraits of these rooms will make a viewer feel full.

But there are palate cleansers, too, rooms as spare as those found in traditional Japanese houses or voguish dealer galleries.

Actually, the gallery analogy has a more general applicability. The interiors that Ussher most commonly portrays are living or sitting rooms and hallways — spaces with surfaces free for the display of things and experiments with colour.

Extracted from Rooms: Portraits of remarkable New Zealand interiors, by Jane Ussher and John Walsh, Massey University Press ($85).