Author: Peter Peryer

This author has written 889 articles

Congruence Again

 
 
I know I have written about congruence before,
I probably used words like template, and phrases
like templates that I carry, I might have even
said something like that on Kim Hill 
while broadcasting to the nation.
 
I can’t help it, I keep taking photographs that
remind me of photographs that I have taken before, 
although, always hopefully, the most recent will
in flavour and tone at least, add something
to it’s predecessor.
If it doesn’t then I am merely quoting myself,
raking the ashes and that is not healthy. 
The top photo was taken about 4 years ago at
McCraes Flat gold mine in Otago.
These trucks are huge and I printed a few
of these images biggish in this case but not
just because the trucks were big of course.
I think I sold 3 or 4 prints.
 
The other photo was taken in Norsewood, 
about a year ago,
a Danish settlement in the
lower half of the North Island.
I noticed these stumps on a distant hill.
I don’t know what the trees were originally.
There will be many people in Norsewood who
could tell me and I’m ready to ask them.
 
These stumps were a long way away but luckily
I had just bought a new Nikon
for about $800  mainly because it 
has a huge telephoto lens. 
 
That lens enabled me to reach out
and suck this photo in. I particularly like the flattening
of the planes.
 

Sydney

 
When I travel,  I’m always looking
for a new photo. Having a few
days in Sydney last week gave me
a chance to do some exploring.
The structure in a children’s playground
caught my attention so I took a quick snap
with my phone.
Not as interesting to me but
not one I want to discard just yet
is this photo of the Sydney Harbour
bridge.

Eugene Atget

 
 
Last week I was in Sydney 
and went to see an exhibition
Gallery of New South Wales.
 
There were over 200 works 
on the walls
but what impressed me was the large number 
of visitors to the show. 
Every wall was crowded like this,
catalogue sold out.
It was a pleasure to behold.

Recent

 
Here is my most recent photo.
I was gardening and there it was,
staring me in the face.
It’s probably the second or third time
that I’ve attempted this photo,
over as many years.
I’ve always made sure that there
was a gooseberry bush somewhere in the garden.
But with this photo, I think that
I have found what I was looking for.

The Divided House

 
 
The Divided House was what I called
the photo above, probably it was about 
1976.
 
In reality it is two halves of a house that was
being relocated to this site. The blocks that
they are sitting on are hidden in this view,
slightly over the horizon.
 
A couple of years ago, while driving through
the Hokianga in the Far North I came across
this abandoned school. I’ve not yet printed 
this photo up into an edition 
but would like to do so soon.
 
I have a soft spot for the Hokianga,
 I lived there for some time as a boy
and I went to a school very like the one on
the left. It is closed now.
 

1975 to 2011

 
The first photo was taken in 1975 within
perhaps  a year of me beginning to 
photograph. I was driving through
Taihape and this shelter in a cemetery
caught my eye.
 
The lower photo came last year whilst
I was in Rotorua. Lo and behold there
it is again. 

Congruence Again

 
 
In my previous post
I talked about congruence in 
my work and I gave some
examples.
 
Here are another two examples.
The tree is Ratanui, the biggest 
Rata in New Zealand, in a reserve just north of 
Wanganui, and a photo
that I took almost 10 years ago.
 
The lower one is a citrus, and a photo
that is about 4 months old.
 
 

Congruence

 
 
I am showing you this image above
in order to illustrate one way in which
 I work.
 
I have just been to an exhibition of art
from South Asia, a large exhibition
being held here at the Govett-Brewster 
in New Plymouth.
 
I don’t want to talk about the exhibition
in this post, merely say that for some reason
buried deep in my unconscious, the 
arrangement of these 200 sewing machines 
draped in flags of the world affected
me in exactly the same way
as the shopping trolleys
from the previous post.
 
 
 
When I say affected, I mean somewhere
in my viscera, not anywhere eyebrows up.
I have no idea why it should be so.
 
It has nothing to do 
with this artist’s work or the gallery’s intention,
it is just that I seem to carry around templates
that I am constantly looking for and here I found some
objects that fitted. 
 
Below are two spectacular
examples of this congruence.
These are in a sense, the same
photo.
 
 
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