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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.
 
 

Supermarket

 
 
While shopping in the Freemans Bay
New World in Auckland, my attention was caught
by these trolleys tightly packed together.
 
This photo is not
one that I would include in 
my ultimate body of work
but I need to pay attention as 
to why it caught my attention
in the first place. There is something
here that is saying hello Peter.
 
 

Waitomo Caves Hotel

 
 
A couple of weeks ago while exploring
limestone caves two hours drive 
north of where I live, 
 I stayed for 
two nights in the Waitomo Caves Hotel
shown above.
 
I was glad to stay there because the
last time I had visited was when 
I was a boy. I stayed in this very hotel.
It was one of a number of resort hotels that
had been built by the New Zealand Government,
Chateau Tongariro was another one.
 
My parents used to go on Winter holidays
in their expensive Jaguar, all walnut 
and leather, to these hotels. 
Amazingly they used to let me drive
this machine when I was about 16 or 17.
This car was often seen outside Takapuna Grammar School.
 
 
 
After I had stayed in the Waitomo Caves Hotel
and saw the architecture of the hotel
I was so reminded of an abandoned hospital
here in New Plymouth.
I think that it may have been  built by
the same government architects.
 

Waterfall 1982

 
 
Once on the Napier Taupo highway
with a close friend called Trevor Haysom
I came across this waterfall.
I had to take a photo of it because 
to me it seemed so Amazonian.
 
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