Curio Bay

item details

NameCurio Bay

ProductionHaruhiko Sameshima; photographer; 1995; Southland

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, toning

DimensionsImage: 575mm (width), 470mm (height)

Registration NumberO.027377

Credit linePurchased 2001 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

Overview

This black and white photograph was taken by Haruhiko Sameshima in 1995 using a large-format camera with an eight by ten inch negative. The image features a petrified forest located at Curio Bay in the Catlins, an area in the southern part of the South Island.

Stone and concrete
Curio Bay is closely related to Queens Park (1995), another Sameshima photograph in the Te Papa collection. Queens Park is a black and white large-format photograph of petrified tree stumps set in concrete in Queens Park, Invercargill's principle civic park. Together, both photographs comment on social attitudes to natural phenomena: the petrified trees of both photographs have been packaged for urban consumption. The visual relationship between the photographs (both are in a horizontal format and have a diagonal element in the foreground) is a device through which Sameshima can evoke the strangeness of Queens Park, and in turn emphasise how cultural (rather than innocent) his presentation of Curio Bay really is.

Picturing New Zealand
Curio Bay is part of an ongoing photographic project called eco-Tourism, which Sameshima began in 1994. He had returned to Elam School of Fine Arts at Auckland University in order to develop his knowledge of New Zealand photography, and his Master of Fine Arts proposal involved visiting museums around the country with significant photographic collections. He would view these collections, familiarising himself with the history of New Zealand photography, and at the same time take photographs of the museums and galleries in which the images were held. As well, Sameshima would photograph landscapes - such as the petrified forest at Curio Bay - using an aesthetic approach that made references to the photographs he was seeing in museum and gallery collections.