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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Photography offers substitutes for reality. Its invention was a great gift to the voyeur, who could now openly stare, at a remove, without censure or embarrassment. But equally it empowered the subjects of such observation to create the image they wanted to project — implying another sort of audience. These two perspectives come together in Fiona Clark’s work of the 1970s.
Majority culture was fracturing in this period, and the rights and visibility of minorities correspondingly being asserted. The power imbalance of traditional documentary photography — where the photographer parachuted in to take images of voiceless subjects for the satisfaction of middle-class curiosity — began to look increasingly untenable.
Fiona Clark was one who offered a different approach, drawing on the qualities of family photography. Rather than the impersonal artfulness of the photojournalist or documentarian’s photo story, her work was more akin to the snapshot: direct, loosely framed, intimate and, above all, a collaboration between herself and her subjects. Clark became involved in Auckland’s gay, lesbian and transgender scene while a photography student at Elam School of Fine Arts, first when working in coffee bars downtown and then via the gay liberation movement at the university. It was a community that she ‘felt safe in for the first time in my life’ and was the obvious choice of subject: ‘I didn’t see anything else to photograph … There was no other option for me but to be true to who I was.’ 1
Many of Clark’s photographs were taken at Mojo’s nightclub. Another young art student who ventured through its doors, David Lyndon Brown, described how he was ‘entranced and terrified at being in such a rarefied and glamorous atmosphere’. The flatmates who accompanied him seemed to think it was a freak show. But in viewing Clark’s photographs he later wrote: ‘These queens signify bravery, dedication and defiance. They are men who have transformed themselves, recreated themselves, against all odds, into women. They have realised their own mythology.’2
Athol McCredie
1 Fiona Clark, Go girl, exhibition catalogue, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 2002, pp. 8 and 20.
2 David Lyndon Brown, ‘Flaming creatures’, in Clark, Go girl, p. 22.