Athenes

This black and white photograph was taken by Haruhiko Sameshima in 1992 while the artist was travelling around Europe. Having graduated from Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland in 1992, Sameshima went on a compressed version of the traditional New Zealand O E (overseas experience), visiting France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Hungary, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. Athenes was taken in a museum in Greece, and it focuses on the shadow cast by a plinth and glass display case, which holds an ancient bronze male figure.

Shadows and illusions
Sameshima's photograph is notable for the way in which it captures what might be called a peripheral detail. The statue itself, the usual focus of attention, is shifted to the side in favour of an insubstantial shadow, a transient effect of the sun's movement during the course of the day. The shadow makes reference to the concept of Plato's cave. Plato, the famous Greek philosopher, believed that images were deceptive and treacherous, and argued that they should be banned from the new Republic he described in his writing. What could be more apt than a photograph taken in Greece referencing a concept that has affected the reception of visual art throughout the history of Western thought?

A new kind of documentary
But in a larger sense, Athenes shares a great deal with Diva, Paris, another photograph by Sameshima in Te Papa's collection, which was also created during Sameshima's 1992 European travels. Both photographs are interested in systems of culture and representation - particularly those of advertising and museums - that structure societies and cultures. By 1992 Sameshima had become interested in what might be called ways of behaving and existing that were global or common across cultures. This isn't quite the same as the documentary project of much twentieth-century photography because Sameshima wasn't looking at humanist subjects or trying to extrapolate essential characteristics common to different ethnic and cultural groups. Rather, he was mapping the flows and ebbs of culture, specifically the ways in which a variety of sites, such as museums or public advertising, shared qualities established by globalisation. Athenes is therefore not about Greece at all, but about the ways in which cultures can be subjected to the forces represented by the museum - an international institution that smooths cultural difference and packages it for easy consumption.