|
February 14, 2011
Photography is popular in New Zealand as an art form, concerned with the creation of images, the ideas communicated, and how they in turn make the viewer contemplate subjects and ideas.
Derek Henderson is a NZ fashion photographer who spent the better part of the last twenty years in New York, London and Los Angeles, and is now living in Auckland. He regularly returns to New Zealand for photographic trips. All his personal work is done in New Zealand.
The Terrible Boredom of Paradise' (2005) collects a series of photographs resulting from a 13,000 km road trip from Westport, South Island to Hikurangi, North Island over four and half months with a 4x5 camera. It is old New Zealand:
Derek Henderson, 41 Palmerston Street, Riverton, Southland, 10:30am, 23rd February, 2004, from The Terrible Boredom of Paradise' (2005)
Like Robert Adams's 'New Topography' of the 1960s and 1970s, Henderson highlights human impact on landscape. The power lines against the sea, the rusting train carriage that frames a mountain, the dilapidated shack incongruously boasting a blooming hydrangea show a country where beauty is everywhere but often ignored and invariably damaged.
Derek Henderson, Kohaihai Road, North Beach, West Coast, 10:30am, 9th February, 2004.
He observes that it "It’s a beautiful landscape, but everyone seems to be quite bored.”
A latter rbook is "Mercer Mercer "(2008), which is is a photographic exploration of the Waikato River:
Derek Henderson talks about his exhibition at the ACP from ACP Exhibitions on Vimeo.
This body of work is as a reaction to the stereotype in the plethora of New Zealand’s scenic landscape books that present a certain skewed depiction of NZ as a wilderness paradise in the form of photographic journal of a roadtrip that refers back to Robin Morrison’s The South Island of New Zealand from the Road (1981).
|
