Man on ramp

Man on ramp was photographed by Steve Rumsey in 1952. The photograph depicts a man in a hat walking on a concrete ramp at the Mt Albert Plant Research Station where Rumsey was working as a scientific photographer at the time. Photographed from the roof of the building, the camera looking straight down towards its subject, the man's shadow and the drainage grooves of the ramp dominate the image. The result is a recognisable subject that is also an abstract composition.

Ideas and images
This photograph has two subjects: the man walking on the ramp, and the theme of City. Man on ramp is one of a number of photographs that Rumsey took in the period 1948-1964 illustrating abstract themes. As Rumsey wrote in an essay published in New Zealand Journal of Photography in 1993, 'Among other things, I wanted to photograph ideas.' Rumsey had a list of twenty-five ideas or themes that he set about photographing: Man on ramp is one, and others in Te Papa's collection include Design no. 20 (1954), which is also an illustration of the theme City; and Man and atom (1957), which is about Atomic Energy. The prominence of this approach in Rumsey's work was captured in an exhibition called Ideas and Images: Steve Rumsey and the Camera Club Movement 1948-1964, curated by Damian Skinner at the Lopdell House Gallery, Auckland, in 2003. As Skinner writes in the catalogue, 'Rumsey's images drew on 20th century ideas about photography in order to illustrate an alternative to the conservative and outdated photography of the camera club movement.'

European modernism
As Skinner notes in his essay, Rumsey's photographic philosophy was closely related to the 'new photography' movement that developed in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Promoted by artists like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus school, the 'new photography' sought to create a new aesthetic that fully embraced photography's modern potential. As Rumsey put it in 'The Light', an essay published in The Developer Enlarger magazine of June 1955, 'Photography was a product of the machine age: an age of science and mass-production.' The 'new photography', like Rumsey, made the most of photography's ability to represent known subjects in new and surprising ways. As Skinner writes, 'Man on Ramp (1952) and Tissue Culture (1957) exploit the "new photography's" interest in unusual perspectives and camera angles.' Photographs like Man on ramp demonstrate Rumsey's interest in the radical potential of European modern art, and they mark a decisive break with the conventional subjects and approaches of much New Zealand photography prior to and during the 1950s.