Khyber Pass, Grafton

In this colour photograph of an empty parking lot in Khyber Pass, Grafton, taken in 1988, Haruhiko Sameshima has creating an image of a city in transition with its empty lot, prefabricated building, and established weeds.

The documentary tradition
Khyber Pass, Grafton was taken while Sameshima was studying photography at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland. The senior lecturer of the photography department, John B Turner, asked the Studio Two students to document the changing face of Auckland - a city undergoing a major construction phase in the 1980s. Turner was keen for the students to photograph in black and white, the traditional medium of documentary photography in the twentieth century, and in a time of massive change the expectation was that the students would document the rapidly disappearing past. Sameshima's photographs challenged both expectations by being in colour and focusing on newly erected buildings.

Photographic allusions
There are still connections between Khyber Pass, Grafton and the documentary tradition, however. Elam Art School had an extensive photographic library that gave Sameshima the resources to continue developing his awareness of past examples of photographic history and practice. Khyber Pass, Grafton demonstrates this growing awareness, alluding to American photographer Walker Evans's photographs of advertising billboards in America in the 1930s. In a sense, Sameshima emulates Evans's visual contrast between real life and the façade constructed by advertising representations, both transformed in turn by the camera. But another message of Khyber Pass, Grafton is impermanence, the billboard with its giant arrow speaking of (and pointing to) elsewhere, while the empty car park with its temporary building and tall weeds is a neglected environment only ever passed through.