The orange bathroom

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).

Are the pleasures of rubber against the skin all that different to those of owning a bathroom lined with swirling red marble and mirrors that reflect each other to infinity? Ava Seymour’s photograph balances between the bizarre and the plausible to ask us just that. Because photography tends to work in genres, we can usually safely read its many varieties without getting tripped up. But by cutting and pasting a figure from a rubber fetish magazine into a page from a dated high-end décor publication, Seymour has deliberately scrambled the signals. It is hard to think of two more unlikely sources of imagery to put together. In their new configuration, both find themselves undermined — or, depending on your perspective, enhanced — by the other.