Globe, Canterbury Museum

item details

NameGlobe, Canterbury Museum

ProductionHaruhiko Sameshima; photographer; 1995; New Zealand

Classificationblack-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: 455mm (width), 456mm (height)

Registration NumberO.027382

Credit linePurchased 2001 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

Overview

This black and white photograph by Haruhiko Sameshima features the globe in the natural history section of the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch. It was taken in 1995 using a Zeiss Super Ikonta camera and a two-and-a-quarter-square-inch negative. The globe looms out the darkness, all background details suppressed in favour of a prominent representation of New Zealand, which is dramatically lit and tilted towards the viewer.

Photographing the museum
While Sameshima's photograph crops the subject to enhance the drama of the scene, Globe, Canterbury Museum, 1995 gains much of its power by presenting the museum's own display strategies to the viewer. On one level the image is a critical investigation of how museums package and display information, but it also buys into some of these techniques to create a dramatic photograph. The image is part of Sameshima's ongoing investigation of the systems of culture and representation that structure our experience of the world. Globe, Canterbury Museum, 1995, like Birds, AWMM and Athenes (two other photographs in Te Papa's collection), is an opportunity to think about the particular ways in which museums have a privileged role in shaping our understanding of the world and our place in it.

The global and the local
Both the globe in the Canterbury Museum and Sameshima's photograph of it put New Zealand in the centre of the map. While the museum's purpose in tilting the globe is to explore the natural heritage of this part of the world, Sameshima's photograph belongs in the context of the early 1990s, a time when there was intense questioning of the relationship between New Zealand and international art. Exhibitions like Pacific Parallels: Artists and the Landscape in New Zealand, which travelled to America in 1991, and Headlands: Thinking Through New Zealand Art, which took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney, Australia in 1992, are indicative of this questioning of the place of local art practice in international contexts.