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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 320.
In the days when butchers’ shops were a feature of the suburban landscape, it was common to see a few plastic flowers or fern fronds decorating the cleared-away window display trays after hours — not as any sort of memorial to slaughtered animals, but simply to counter the sterile expanse of stainless steel. Bryony Dalefield may initially have set out to photograph these dismal offerings. But in this photograph, her interest has instead been captured by the way the plastic roses adorn her own truncated body, reflected in the window. With its overlapping reflections and surfaces, the image is so ambiguous as to almost defy interpretation. Both the trace of Dalefield’s own presence and the complexity of her reflection combine to disrupt the conventional sense of photography as an authorless eye on a straightforward world of facts.