Taranaki (The heavens declare the glory of God), New Plymouth, 14 May 1986

item details

NameTaranaki (The heavens declare the glory of God), New Plymouth, 14 May 1986

ProductionLaurence Aberhart; photographer; 1986; Taranaki

Classificationblack-and-white prints, gelatin silver prints, black-and-white photographs, works of art

Materialssilver, photographic paper, photographic gelatin

Materials Summaryblack and white photograph, gelatin silver print

Techniquesblack-and-white photography

DimensionsImage: 195mm (height), 246mm (length)

Registration NumberO.027894

Credit linePurchased 2003

Overview

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Laurence Aberhart’s world is filled with artefacts and remnants of times past. He is captivated by subjects that are passing into history before his eyes. Photography is his way of memorialising them, whether they are Masonic lodges, Northland churches and marae, or war memorials. Just as his photographic prints register the fading light at the end of the day, so his photographic project registers the dying-out of structures, which the culture at large or individual communities once held dear.

A particularly adroit observer of the paradoxical nature of both sacred and secular structures, here he photographs a building devoted to science — an observatory — which has had a religious sentiment handpainted on a panel beneath the heavenward curve of its dome. Elsewhere, Aberhart’s photographs of churches pay much attention to the down-to-earth details of environments designed to serve a transcendental function.

‘What I am photographing has usually been deemed unimportant’, Aberhart wrote in 2007. ‘I aim at delivering it back at people, full-force … making them confront what they don’t want to.’1 Using the painstaking, slow mechanism of a Korona eight-by-ten-inch view camera, Aberhart has an eye for abstract geometries, such as the half-circle of the observatory roof juxtaposed with the pyramidal form of the mountain in the Taranaki photograph. His photographs are invariably an exercise in geometrical ordering, just as they are the product of opportunistic sighting and more than four decades of driving all over New Zealand. To that ongoing journey Aberhart has added in recent years extensive travel in Australia, Asia, North America and Europe, observing the same patterns and currents in human history that he finds in outlying or overlooked locations in New Zealand.

Gregory O'Brien

1 Laurence Aberhart, email to Gregory O’Brien; reprinted in Laurence Aberhart, with essays by Gregory O’Brien and Justin Paton, Aberhart, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2007, p. 261.