Neil Pardington, who will exhibit a series on scientific collections in museums at the Auckland Festival of Photography, has a brief series on meat abattoirs.

I would have thought that this was one of those inaccessible and ‘forbidden’ spaces:

Since Pardington photographed only on Sundays so the abattoir is devoid of people, carcasses and movement. The above image is of the place of electrocution-- it shows a form of mechanized death. A stainless steel environment that is part of f working in a series – the idea of returning to a similar subject over and over again.

Pardington is both a film maker and photographer.

In 1986 Pardington began working with a large format camera (4x5) completing the series Local Anxieties, which documented buildings in Whanganui, a city affected by recession. He returned to large format photography in 2003 to photograph in the world of hospitals and medical museums for The Clinic series.

His latter project was The Vault, in which he photographed museum and art gallery storerooms. He highlighted thee strange and sometimes surprising collections of objects amassed behind the closed doors of New Zealand’s museums and art galleries; bizarre places stocked with piles of archival films, stuffed deer, Victorian portraits, mannequins in disrepair and assiduously preserved taonga.