Scone Ave, kitchen

The title of this black and white photograph by Haruhiko Sameshima locates the image precisely. Taken in 1981, the photograph documents the kitchen of the old villa in Scone Ave, North East Valley, Dunedin, where Sameshima was living.

Animated effects
Scone Ave, Kitchen is notable for the strange perspective and distinctive dark halo that surrounds the kitchen shelf, foodstuffs, and utensils. Sameshima achieved these effects by blue-tacking a wide-angled lens from a 35 mm camera to his 4 x 5 inch Linhof camera. The black circle around the edge of the photograph was produced because the negative in the camera was larger than the circumference of the lens, while the optical effect of the wide-angle lens has distorted the objects being photographed. This is most notable in the wood panelling on the walls, and creates a slightly unsettling animation of objects like the metal teapot to the lower right of the image.

Technologies of representation
This photograph is about perception, and it evokes a kind of tunnel vision in which the edges of the image are literally obscured. In the early 1980s Sameshima was concerned with the qualities of the photographic medium and the technology he was using - and the effects of different technologies on the kinds of representations produced by the camera. A photograph like Scone Ave, Kitchen is therefore better understood as a formal investigation of the possibilities of photography rather than a conceptual exploration of ideas like the domestic or home. A humble kitchen becomes a handy subject on which Sameshima can experiment, rendering the familiar strange by the technologies of representation he chooses to use.