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Overview
This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
Since 1885, when Alfred Burton photographed its people and scenery on a survey expedition into the King Country, the Whanganui River has been a frequent subject of photography. Almost a century later, in 1979, Whanganui-born Anne Noble set out on a concentrated project to find a personal connection with a local landscape and its history along this river.
Like all rivers, the Whanganui passes through many phases along its two hundred and ninety kilometres to the sea, and Noble’s work was a sustained and committed exploration of the river as a living entity: ‘I was looking at its wildness, its serenity, its physical force. How it looks when it is swollen, turbulent, misty, calm — all its moods.’1 She said that one of her aims was ‘to offer my pictures as an experience of this landscape, to make people love it very deeply’.2 Her choice of the word ‘experience’ is significant, for Noble did not mean to simply add to a century’s worth of scenic photography by creating ‘views’ from well-known vantage points. Her approach was much more immersive, and intent on conveying the things that are less visible: the feel or spirit of places along the river rather than their look — places steeped in Māori and Pākehā history, and that change according to the season, weather and time of day.
In The gorge above Pipiriki the landscape is wilfully obscured — by darkness as well as mist. Black and white was Noble’s chosen medium for the first half of her career, and the mysteries of light her theme. Here the enveloping blackness obscures detail to focus attention on the inexorable flow of the river. The light off its turbulent, oily surface is almost black itself — a sheen covering powerful, silent, unknown depths.
Athol McCredie
1 Cited in Rhondda Bosworth, introduction to Anne Noble, ‘The Wanganui: Photographs of a river’, PhotoForum, no. 51/52, September 1982, p. 7.
2 Ibid., p. 6.