Maori Bay

item details

NameMaori Bay

ProductionHaruhiko Sameshima; photographer; 1990; New Zealand

Classificationlandscapes, black-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: 427mm (height), 308mm (length)

Registration NumberO.027364

Credit linePurchased 2001 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

Overview

This black and white photograph was taken by Haruhiko Sameshima in 1990. It is a depiction of the rock formations at Maori Bay, just north of Auckland on the west coast. The photograph was produced with a large format, 4 x 5 inch Linhof camera, and the black and white print has been toned, giving it a lustrous finish.

Photographic history

Maori Bay is an example of Sameshima's interest in landscape, a theme that becomes increasingly prominent in his photography in the 1990s. While it is true that there is no such thing as an innocent photograph of the landscape, Sameshima's landscape images are particularly shaped by his growing awareness of international and local photographic history. The photograph was taken while Sameshima was studying at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, completing a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, and it represents his desire to grapple with photography's past. The large format and the toning represent Sameshima's knowledge of New Zealand landscape photography of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and his desire to make contemporary images that embodied a consciousness of previous images of the New Zealand landscape.

'Aesthetic Science'

Maori Bay was exhibited at the Lazelle Gallery in Auckland in 1992 as part of an exhibition called Aesthetic Science. The show was Sameshima's first solo exhibition after graduating from the Elam School of Fine Arts, and the name was a play on the aesthetics and history of photography he had studied, as well as the scientific processes of classifying and ordering the natural world. Sameshima was proposing his photography as a kind of prettified science, a fake science of the image, in which the natural (landscapes like Maori Bay) and the artificial (photographs of consumer goods) jostled against each other.