Julius Margan

I remember, as a kid, comparing my family's home and yard to those of my schoolmates and neighbours – wondering about things like how our house compared to our neighbours or how we might be perceived to others. Our house was a nice example of a villa, but the front yard was hidden behind a large brown fence that had seen better days, covered in creeper with rocks lining the bottom of it facing the footpath. An old weeping willow in the yard sagged over the fence in one corner. Around the back of the house a thicket of bamboo backed on to our neigbour's section. The whole thing was effective at keeping people from looking in too closely, but it was far from the suburban picket-fence ideal. Eventually things changed – the bamboo came out first, and later the fence was replaced with a much nicer (to my eyes) white version.

Our neigbours properties were slightly different to the norm. The elderly lady who lived next to us had a brick house where she'd probably lived for much of her life. The windows were barred to prevent unlawful entry and it felt like a kind of fear hung over the place. Now, in retrospect it seems entirely reasonable that someone living alone at that age would want to feel protected and be surrounded by familiar old things, but its effect then was that of a strange unease. In complete contrast to it, the section across the road from it was owned by one of Auckland most wealthy residents – a huge piece of land with what seemed me to be a mansion-like house further down a long driveway. The place was shrouded in mystery as the house was barely visible behind acres of well-manicured lawns and a stately entrance-way.

Such memories came to mind as I looked at the work of photographer Gregory Conniff. His photographs from the late '70s and early '80s could be associated with the work from the New Topographics exhibition, but where much of the photography from that show examined the increasingly faceless industrialization of architectural design, or the particularly American vernacular of the suburb, this work is more of a nod towards the simple domestic backyard decisions we make to define the boundaries of our properties – the set of familiar patterns and ornaments surrounding our homes that we adhere to as an unwritten rule. The pictures he makes are structured so that no one element asserts priority and the photos have a shared commonality with the work of Lee Friedlander – and as such, an acknowledgment that the social landscape is a slightly chaotic place governed by societal rules and design choices that have been so ingrained that we barely think of them at all.

The photos offer many familiar recurring motifs. Fences of the chain-link, picket or pale variety collide with each other or overlap large sections of the frame, obscuring the view and breaking up the picture plane. Clothes lines, a volleyball net and power lines criss-cross through the scene and play little visual games with harsh shadows from barren tree branches. Boundaries between properties are blurred by overhanging trees and unkempt hedges. Occasionally nature dominates the frame almost completely and we peer through tangles of branches and leaves that cast deep shadows on to side walls and dark windows.

We construct our houses, gardens and fences from these same natural elements, molded into a sense of order that we accept as a common visual language. To add further emphasis: these are black and white photographs; colour images would deflect attention away from this point. Other artists have worked in similar territory in colour successfully. In some of her '70s conceptual triptychs, Jan Groover photographed well-maintained suburban houses with gardens. Joel Meyerowitz famously worked in the small town of Provincetown, in Cape Cod. Edward Hopper painted houses similar to those shown in Conniff's photos. For each of those artists – even including Groover's more austere conceptualism, colour provides an additional psychological dimension. There is loneliness and melancholy in the cool rooms lit by warm shafts of light in Hopper's paintings. Colour was essential to Meyerowitz's photographs, and Groover was exploring the formal language of photography, something that colour is an intrinsic part of, but rarely recognised in fine art until the 1970s. Conniff's photos are about tonality as much as their subject matter, and they allow each of their elements equal say. Questions about house paint colours and seasonal variations in foliage are cast aside. We are left to address the common fundamentals of nature that bind us together as a community.

Conniff is represented by the Joseph Bellows Gallery, who also represent Wayne Gudmundson, who offers an interesting counterpoint to Conniff's work.

Gudmundson too, is interested in the marks we make on the landscape, but his landscape is that of the developed countryside. Houses are sparsely laid-out, and function dictates form more often than in those of the urban environment. His landscapes are flat, featureless, and where trees are planted, the feeling is that they have been placed there for a specific functional purpose – to provide shelter, or to outline to boundary of a property. The land is vast and the horizons are deep. Agricultural fields and grasslands dominate the scene, interrupted by tire tracks, plowed fields, or roughly-cast roads with ragged edges.

There is a tradition of romanticising the countryside and photographers joke about barn photos being clichés, but the idyllic country landscape has a long history in painting – such as that commonly seen in the works of John Constable. This is the language of the picturesque, incorporating elements of the rustic, and connecting the two elements most commonly seen in this style of painting – that of harmonious beauty and that of the sublime -- further mixed with the weathered grit of everyday man-made life. In Constable's paintings, nature asserts dominance over man and tall trees often tower over scenes of rural domesticity. There is still the sense of vastness commonly associated with the Romantic painters, but he took it in a new direction, and concentrated more on everyday life. He saw beauty in a rural fence or simple farmyard scene. As with many new concepts widely recognised, this eventually fell into the realm of the cliché, where it finally eventually ended up as a basic signpost for a feeling, devoid of any original meaning or intent. This translated into the world of photography – the charm of the “Old Barn” and its modern-day, dystopian version which typically manifests itself in the urban decay of the city or the neglected corporate/industrial facade of a failed enterprise.
 

Gudmundson avoids these traps however, which is no mean feat considering that the countryside isn't usually a hot-topic for contemporary art. The simple building facades and flat plains in these pictures speak more of a kind of minimalism than a rustic charm. The landscape is pared back to its essentials while still offering productivity. Buildings have empty facades or no apparent windows; they're simple shells for their function. Industry is present, but these aren't the Bechers' silos. The land is carefully cultivated but verging on barren, and any signs of humanity immediately become focal-points for the picture – a power-line, fence-line or traffic sign. These are about traces of activity and small disruptions to the land and offer up quiet reflection rather than heavy-handed critique.

It's interesting going back three decades to the work from the New Topographics exhibition. There were other photographers working in this area that were less well known, but offered work equally as good. A reminder too, that in part, due to limitations of technology, photographs were often smaller then, and as such were more intimate for the viewer to experience. Revisiting some of these less well known photographers shows how fresh that work still is, and how much it differs from the high-sheen large-scale colour photos that have become de rigueur for many photographers working in a similar field these days. Each offers its advantages, but for me, small-scale monochrome photography still shows a freshness and vitality to it whilst remaining contemporary. It'd be nice to see more of it.