Richard Wotton’s black and white photographic images from the 1970s and 1980s, made with medium and large-format cameras, registered with a touching accuracy and an elegant simplicity the traces of life as it is lived in New Zealand, the past intertwined with the present in a quiet hymn to intimacy and familiarity.



More than two decades ago – as photographers often do – Wotton fell out of love with the medium and, instead, focused his enthusiasm on kite-flying. However, this new work, made over the past three years, shows all the benefits of his earlier analogue experience combined with an openness to newer digital possibilities.



Wanting to remember is a strong human impulse, a necessary need in maintaining one’s bearings in this increasingly bewildering world where the pace of change becomes insistent. Wotton’s recent photographs of local and regional vernacular architecture – those mostly unpretentious, workaday structures going largely unnoticed – serve this need by drawing attention to their common ordinariness and uncommon quirkiness, where minimal and useful aspects triumph over the aesthetic.



What Richard Wotton’s work gently suggests is these structures are not only worth noticing but deserve remembering. And being remembered is mostly their fate: as masonry buildings of limited economic use, with few appearing on any heritage lists, many are doomed to disappear in the wake of local authorities raising structural strength requirements after the 2011/12 Christchurch earthquakes. In this way, the bright, sharp light he photographs them in becomes, ironically, a kind of portentous sunset.



Wotton’s skill in orchestrating that bright, sharp light is a consistent feature of these new photographs. The plainest walls become animated by interplays of light and shadow, these brief interactions of time momentarily investing these structures with a dignity and simple beauty their builders never imagined and we rarely notice. Townscape features such as telegraph poles, their wires and advertising signs are seldom considered beautiful, yet within these images their value is redeemed as essential elements in compositional success. Further, what applies to the subject matter applies to the images themselves: that play of light and shadow giving rhythmic pulse to the frequently severely formal nature of these images, and as so often in art, the sum is greater than its parts.



Stylistically, these recent photographs can look old-fashioned. So much contemporary work is in colour and younger photographers have repudiated a formal style going back to the 1930s. But style is the wheels and art is the engine, and in any given period it’s not always easy to look at the latest tyres and deduce what the horsepower might be. But Wotton’s a stayer, and in the lexicon of photography, articulation of light’s never out of fashion, and images provoking us to look twice never out of style.





Peter Ireland

March 2012



Note: Peter Ireland is New Zealand’s foremost photography curator, commentator, critic and writer.