Bed, Union St., Auckland

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

John Fields says he was drawn to this bed of an artist and writer friend because of the light and texture, and the way the oriental wallpaper below the window was illuminated by light reflected off the sheets. This photograph and others he took with his tripod-mounted view camera in the run-down house slated for motorway demolition in central Auckland marked the beginning of his ‘Signature’ series on inanimate objects that bore the character of their owners or users.

In 1960s New Zealand the deliberate and contemplative approach of photographing things simply as they are was not well established. In fact, Fields himself claims that when he took Bed, Union St., Auckland, he was working without any defined blueprint. It was only shortly afterwards that he came across American photographs, the seminal 1938 Museum of Modern Art publication on Walker Evans’, and particularly its famous essay by Lincoln Kirstein which argued for the ‘protestant’ virtues of Evans’ spare, measured, factual photography of the vernacular. Fields’ own sense of direction was affirmed by the book, and he was excited by the realisation that the sort of plain documentary photographs he was taking could have expressive value, without the need for dramatisation.

Fields’ alignment with Evans and his seemingly dispassionate insistence on the rendering of detail is illustrated by contrast with the other, ultimately less enduring, strand of American ‘straight photography’ epitomised by the work of Edward Weston and the 1930s Group f.64. In their pursuit of transcendental meaning these photographers tended to eliminate context in order to isolate sensuous, organic form. Fields, however, depicts a bed whose sheets, with their permanent-looking creases, appear as much slept in as sculptural. We wonder more about its absent occupant than about the aesthetics of line and volume. The four-by-five-inch negative renders details like the crude repair job on the bottom sheet and the black hole on the top so clearly as to draw the viewer’s attention further to the social and the particular, rather than the abstract and universal.

Athol McCredie