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Overview
Dilapidated concrete shelter (bus shelter?) next to a road. Behind the shelter two tall cypress trees stand against an overcast sky. To the left and right of them other trees with bare branches stand against the skyline.
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 319.
This shelter, with its funereal cypress trees, still exists at Taihape cemetery. You can even see it on Google Street View, where it looks much more welcoming than in Peter Peryer’s dark and blurry image taken with a toy Diana camera. He transforms the building into something intensely lonely, haunted and alive, with the two square windows suggesting eyes and the crooked pair of cypresses like frightened and alert animal ears that seem to crackle with static electricity. Silhouetted on the crest of the hill, tombstones and skeletal trees add a bleak, horror-movie backdrop. This doesn’t look like a shelter where you would be glad to take refuge: more like one you’d hurry past in case something unspeakable reached out to grab you.