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Overview
This photograph by Laurence Aberhart features an outdoor shower at Midway Beach, Gisborne. While this is a prosaic subject, Aberhart's image connects to his interest in sites of remembrance and metaphors of mortality. The cross-structure of the beach shower evokes other subjects favoured by Aberhart: old churches, cemeteries, war memorials, museums, masonic lodges, and historical landmarks.
Techniques of photography
In Midway Beach, Gisborne, Aberhart uses a variety of techniques to create the unsettling visual effects of the photograph. Light seems to radiate from the headland and blow against the 'cross', while the perspective of the image rushes towards a distant vanishing point. These effects are created by Aberhart darkening the photograph's corners and using the lens to elongate elements of the scene - the shower grilles, the beach, and the sky.
An image of something else
Further photographic effects help to push this picture towards an image of something else. The pallid half-shadow, the blurred shapes on the beam, and the old-fashioned shower-heads all suggest a derelict cross that belongs more in a cemetery. What draws the eye most powerfully, though, are the yawning, dark grilles; constructed to drain water, here they speak of abattoirs and executions, of blood and death.