Trig, Rangitoto Island

This black and white photograph features a trig located on Rangitoto, a volcanic island in the middle of the Hauraki harbour in Auckland. It was taken in 1993. The trig is photographed in close-up and dominates the image, with the slopes of Rangitoto, the harbour, and Auckland city in the background.

The enigma of the everyday
Trig, Rangitoto Island is a good example of the way in which Peryer often uses seemingly mundane subjects. In the 1980s, he moved away from the dramatic and expressionist feeling photographs that he was known for in the 1970s. As Gregory Burke writes in Second Nature: Peter Peryer, Photographer, New Zealand: 'His subject became what we would now think of as characteristic of Peryer's subjects - natural world and the human environment.' Burke notes that this change in subject matter towards the 'seemingly everyday' was matched by a technical change in Peryer's photographic prints: 'His photographs lost their earlier emotional content and he didn't use contrast in the same way, selecting mid-tones and lighter prints.'

Taking in the view
Peryer's photographs are more complex than their 'seemingly everyday' subject matter would suggest. In Trig, Rangitoto Island, the subject is a trig station and the view visible from the high point it occupies. But the photograph also engages with the idea of landscape and representing the landscape. Trig stations lay a scientific grid of numbers and new names over the terrain and are part of the systematic surveillance and mapping of the land. Peryer has photographed the trig in such a way that its cross-shaped top section is transformed into an abstract landscape with a foreground, middle-ground, and distance just like the actual landscape in the photograph. What seems like an innocent image of a commonplace trig turns into a complicated meditation on representation and the politics of landscape and art in New Zealand.