Tissue culture

item details

NameTissue culture

ProductionSteve Rumsey; photographer; 1957; Auckland

Classificationblack-and-white prints, gelatin silver prints, black-and-white photographs, works of art

Materialsphotographic gelatin, silver, photographic paper

Materials Summaryblack and white photograph, gelatin silver print

Techniquesblack-and-white photography

DimensionsImage: 508mm (height), 405mm (length)

Registration NumberO.027055

Credit linePurchased 1998

Overview

'Tissue culture' was photographed by Steve Rumsey in 1957. The photograph was produced for an open week at the Mt Albert Plant Research Station where Rumsey was working as a scientific photographer. The photograph is staged. Rumsey has recreated the procedures of working with plant tissue in a sterile environment. Lit from above and photographed through plate-glass from below, Tissue culture is a dynamic image that demonstrates the camera's potential to represent the world through unexpected perspectives.

The modernist at work
Tissue culture gave Rumsey the opportunity to connect his professional career, creating documentary images of plant diseases and insect pests, with his personal activities as a modernist photographer. The camera angle of 'Tissue culture' - disturbing the viewer's perspective, radically transforming the sense of depth in the photograph, and creating a halo of scientific implements around the laboratory assistant - parallels the interest in cubism and forms of abstraction that were big issues for New Zealand contemporary art in the 1950s. Indeed, in his personal photography Rumsey often created images representing themes such as City, Creativity, and Atomic Energy. 'Tissue culture' could be seen as a representation of Science.

The new photography
'Tissue culture' has much in common with the 'new photography' of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus in the 1920s and 1930s. The new photography shrugged off the ideas of pictorialism (in which fine-art styles like impressionism were copied by photographic techniques) and instead concentrated on more modern possibilities of representation. As Damian Skinner writes in the exhibition catalogue for 'Ideas and Images: Steve Rumsey and the Camera Club Movement 1948-1964', 'alongside New Photography's experimentation with avant-garde ideas like abstraction, photography was firmly cemented in its technological/historical moment: the newly discovered beauty of machines, and the potential uses of photography in the developing mass media'. Tissue culture is not only formally modernist, but it is a kind of advertising exercise, publicising the Plant Research Station's activities. The photograph declares Rumsey's allegiance to the new photography simply in its insistence that science and modern technology are suitable subjects to point the camera at.