Title / object name The living room (The ’great living room’ with open timber roof. The dinning room to left. The great table 5’ 6 x 9’ with top cut from a single rimu log originally 6’ through. The bay window looks across the Bight to Egmont in the distance - A view seldom equalled)
| Maker | Role | Date |
| Shelton, Ann | photographer | 2005 |
Medium Summary diptych of a colour and a black and white photograph: type C print and modern gelatin silver print made from a negative by JW Chapman-Taylor
Classification photographic prints
Section Photography
Registration Number O.032503/A-B
Credit LinePurchased 2008
This pair comes from a series Ann Shelton made about a well known Chapman-Taylor house in Taranaki known as 'The Castle'. Chapman-Taylor often made an extensive photographic record of each of his houses and Shelton traced the negatives he made of this one to the collection of Chapman-Taylor's biographer, Judy Siers. Using these original images, Shelton then took corresponding present-day photographs from the same vantage points.
By presenting her photograph alongside a modern print from Chapman-Taylor's negative we have a 'before and after' or a 'spot the difference' pair. The house is generally well preserved (and now used as tourist accommodation), but subtle changes have also been made. In this case a wall shelf and mirror have been added, looking exactly as though they have always been there (and rather poignantly so, given that one of the reasons Chapman-Taylor took the photographs was to encourage owners to maintain the house as he designed it.)
'Then and now' photography is a familiar publishing genre (usually showing townscapes), but also crops up in architectural illustration, when images of a building as it looked at the time of completion are set against current views. Shelton's pairing recalls these uses of photography, but also her own previous investigations into the histories of place that raise issues about memory and the ability (or otherwise) of photography to represent this. Here Shelton again uses her doubling technique, but this time to present images across a period of 75 years, showing a present that is infused with the past but also separated from it.