Choker

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Fiona Pardington has been a distinctive presence in New Zealand photography since the mid-1980s. In her career she has worked from a feminist viewpoint to explore themes of love and sex, the representation and perception of the body, and the construction of gender and identity. Choker is a key work in this respect. First shown in Pardington’s 1994 exhibition Tainted love, it makes a disturbing link between aggression and desire, revealing the intimacy and danger of sex.

Formally posed, the photograph feels like a glimpse into a normally concealed world. The subject’s throat is ringed by a necklace of bruises. Choker is intentionally ambiguous. It is unclear if these are marks of passion, or bruising left from violence and forced restraint. Is the subject a victim or a willing partner?

Commenting on such disconcerting and compelling works, Gregory Burke wrote that ‘Pardington’s photographs traverse and rattle the boundaries between the ethnographic and the psychological, between the pornographic and the religious. She presents the body as a producer of illusions — a trigger for both carnal and transcendental yearnings.’1

In her subsequent work Pardington, who is of Ngāi Tahu descent, has documented museum collections of taonga Māori and specimens from the natural environment — birds, feathers, shells and nests — as part of an ongoing project exploring identity, memory and loss. She commented in 2006, ‘I think that photography is very much a place of mourning for the things that are valuable in life.’2

Despite the change in subject matter, constants remain in Pardington’s work, particularly the strong formal sensibility of her images, the richness of her prints and the intimacy she creates with her subjects. ‘I think that photography’s deeply sexy too. It’s … got this fantastic capacity to seduce and excite and to bring forward all of those feelings and make you feel that you’re experiencing them for the first time … and that, as an experience, can’t be underestimated. That’s how photography is to me.’3

Megan Tamati-Quennell