Flight, AWMM

This photograph by Haruhiko Sameshima was taken in 1991 at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. Sameshima used a two-and-a-quarter square inch camera for the shot, which features one of the bird dioramas at the museum. Rather than photographing the dioramas from the front, Sameshima's image is constructed so that the viewer looks through the frosted glass background of one diorama into another. The result is a slightly strange perspective that seems to free the birds, the opaque glass heightening the sense that the birds might actually fly and move.

Photographs in the museum
Sameshima was interested in the Auckland War Memorial Museum for a number of reasons. Museums are self-conscious presenters and bastions of culture - their contents automatically transformed into culture and heritage - to the extent that they are themselves cultural sites. The museum gave Sameshima a rich subject to engage with and offered a chance to explicitly tackle the phenomena of high culture - something the shopping malls and other consumer sites he had also started photographing in the late 1980s didn't.

While both museums and malls are cultural sites, the ideology and social practices we associate with each are very different. We think of malls as more 'natural' and less 'loaded', if we think of them as cultural sites at all, and museums as sites of high culture.

There were also personal connections. When Sameshima first came to New Zealand from Japan, he and his father spent a lot of time in the museum, viewing it as a source of information that might unlock and explain their New Zealand experiences. Sameshima's father was a scientist, and interested in the natural and cultural world.

Freezing time
Flight, AWMM is a complex image, very aware of the effects and meanings of photography. One of the powerful mechanisms of the photographic image is the ability to freeze subjects from the flow of time, to sever them from change and movement, and to transform them into an image that is eternal and unchanging. Flight, AWMM draws on three individual processes to explore this phenomena. Firstly, there is the act of taxidermy, which freezes the birds in characteristic positions, freeing them from the effects of decay. Secondly, there is the act of representation of the diorama, in which the museum reconstructs the birds in their habitats. Thirdly, there is Sameshima's photograph, the final act of representation, in which the camera freezes the birds in their place as cultural signs. (It is notable that the dioramas at Auckland Museum no longer exist, demonstrating the power of the photograph to resist change and decay.)