Broadway, Newmarket

The title of Broadway, Newmarket clearly locates this colour photograph taken by Haruhiko Sameshima in 1988. Using a large format, 4 x 5 inch Linhof camera, Sameshima has photographed one of the newly built malls on one of Auckland's busiest commercial streets in the early morning, before the crowds arrive.

Building boom
Sameshima's photograph documents the results of the building boom that transformed Broadway and Auckland. The 1980s were a period of massive change for Auckland city. As the stock market soared, heritage buildings were demolished and replaced by mirror-glass skyscrapers and flashy shopping centres, like the one represented here. In 1987 the stock market crashed, so the year 1988 also marks the end of the high flying 1980s.

Resisting documentary
Broadway, Newmarket was taken as part of Sameshima's studies at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. John B Turner set an assignment in which students were to document the rapidly changing city. Locating the assignment within the history of documentary photography of the twentieth century, Turner encouraged the students to use their camera to document the past, to photograph the heritage that was being destroyed in favour of the new. Sameshima resisted this, documenting instead the newly constructed buildings. His choice of subject and use of colour rather than black and white were not well received because they challenged the conventions of documentary photography and the assumption that photography served the struggle to preserve the past by acting as a witness to change.