Sky Tower, demolished building site

item details

NameSky Tower, demolished building site

ProductionHaruhiko Sameshima; photographer; 1996; Auckland

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), 570mm (height)

Registration NumberO.027384

Credit linePurchased 2001 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds

Overview

This black and white photographic diptych was taken by Haruhiko Sameshima in 1996, during the Sky Tower's construction in Auckland. The photograph depicts a demolished building site on Fanshaw Street in the inner city, with the Sky Tower rising triumphantly in the background. Sameshima used a 4 x 5 inch Linhof camera to create the image, and the vertical orientation of the negative emphasises the contrast between the horizontal emptiness in the foreground and the crowded vertical skyscrapers and Sky Tower in the background.

A city documentary project
Sky Tower, demolished building site is part of a series of photographs of the Sky Tower that Sameshima has been producing since its construction in 1996. But the origins of the series can be traced back even further to 1988 when Sameshima was given a documentary assignment as part of his Batchelor of Fine Arts at Elam art school. The photographs he took for this project - including Khyber Pass, Grafton, Karangahape Road, Newton, and Broadway, Newmarket (all in Te Papa's collection) - rejected the usual documentary focus on the past in favour of newly erected buildings. His photographs of the Sky Tower continue this documentation of changing Auckland, a city undergoing transformation, and in this sense the Sky Tower is a sign of progress.

Photography and progress
While Sky Tower, demolished building site is a 4 x 5 inch negative, there are other photographs in the Sky Tower series that make reference to nineteenth-century photographic traditions and use 10 x 12 inch negatives. These photographs make reference to a time when progress was a less problematic concept than it is now, and could be celebrated in an entirely positive way. Thus, the Sky Tower series explores ideas of development and progress as well as the relationship that photography has to such concepts - photography having been a key way that different periods have constructed and maintained the major social and cultural narratives of the time. Sameshima has also shaped the series by concentrating on juxtapositions of different architectural eras with the Sky Tower. This diptych contrasts the Sky Tower with an inner city corporate environment, but other photographs juxtapose the Sky Tower with colonial era villas or 1970s architecture in Freemans Bay, and so on.