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Surveying the iconic photographs of Laurence Aberhart
A survey of Laurence Aberhart's work, including 235 full-page reproductions of his iconic photographs, is provided in Aberhart, published by Victoria University Press in partnership with City Gallery Wellington and Dunedin Public Art Gallery.
Aberhart, who was born in Nelson in 1949 and has lived in Russell, the Bay of Islands since 1983, is at the forefront of New Zealand photography and is also recognised internationally. An exhibition, Laurence Aberhart, features at City Gallery Wellington until 29 July and brings together more than 200 works from the past four decades -among them, Aberhart's signature images of landscapes, facades, monuments and interiors from New Zealand, Australia and further afield.
The exhibition is touring to Dunedin Public Art Gallery (15 September to 2 December), Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (16 February to 11 May 2008) and other centres with the support of a $25,000 grant from Creative New Zealand.
The publication Aberhart complements the exhibition and includes essays by leading art writers Gregory O'Brien and Justin Paton. O'Brien, who curated the exhibition, worked closely with the photographer and with Justin Paton, Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. It was published with the support of a $15,000 grant from Creative New Zealand.
"A great photograph is like an underground tunnel, linking histories that seemed to be separate," Paton writes. "Aberhart's extraordinary achievement has been to create photographs that carry the intimacy and urgency we associate with certain scenes from our own family albums. In the last two decades, he has widened the focus of his art without diminishing its intensity, moving from the rites and intimacies of his immediate family out into those of the wider culture - an album encompassing, as he put it in an eight-word manifesto from 1985, ‘My family, my country, my head, my heart'."
