David Langman talks to Peter Ireland, Wanganui based painter and freelance curator of photography

Interview - Peter Ireland
David Langman talks to Peter Ireland, Wanganui based painter and freelance curator of photography

Interview conducted on 17 February 2001

DL: Peter, the Looking Back show at McLeavey's is an invitation to look at not only these photographs but also to reflect on photography over the last 50 years. Do you think the reception of photography in NZ has been any different from say Australia or Britain or America?

PI: I think the second part of the question is unanswerable! I suspect that those kinds of generalisations indicate more of a need for reassurance than being portals of illumination. How a medium and practice such as photography is "received" is a very complex cultural dynamic, with the historical and social conditions determining outcomes. All of which is a fascinating arena of study and reflection. Finding out what photographs mean for people is always interesting and surprising at an individual level, but given the nature of this diverse and rapidly changing relationship I think it's unwise to generalise, certainly at some sort of national level. What I do know - and the response to Looking Back has reinforced this - is that, for whatever reason, people can be deeply touched by photographic imagery in ways that are both humbling and encouraging.

But, back to the first part of your question. I'm glad that you think the show's a chance to reflect on photography over the past five decades, but in respect of that side of the show's intent, it's an extremely modest glance, given the scale of the whole thing. There is so little of this looking back with respect to our photographic culture that I think people fall with eagerness on any opportunity, and their gratitude - while appreciated - seems out of all proportion to the scale of the show.

It occurs to me right now that the two parts of your question are closely related. Forgive me, I'm a slow learner! There's a need to make sense of the vast river of photographic imagery, if only to account for the effect that bits of it can have on us. Getting back to that "national reception" idea, I remember vividly the excitement of first seeing Gael Newton's history of photography in Australia, Shades of Light, when it came out in 1988, and in thinking about that now I guess it was partly my response to some "making sense" of a situation closest to ours. And one emanating from a national institution, the National Gallery of Australia!

What role do you think major and other galleries can play in the acceptance of photography as a legitimate art?

Everyone would believe that they have an independent view of things, but, increasingly, it seems to me that our response to anything is to a major degree conditioned by the response of the kind of people we wish to be associated with. The notion of "peer group pressure" is most often applied to the innocent young but I think it applies to adults just as much, if not more so. It's just that adults are more subtle about it.

So, yes, I think the influential role of galleries and museums is enormous. I'd like to go back to the situation existing in NZ in the '50s and what followed in the '60s. OK, the usual complex range of reasons applied, but the groundwork done by the Auckland City Art Gallery in the earlier decade in terms of legitimising the relevance of contemporary NZ art practice as well as confidently asserting that we did have an art history worth recognising had an enormous part in the flowering of NZ art in a very public way during the 1960s. Over a decade and a half, from being virtually an underground activity art became quite sexy socially. I was there!

I'd like to give another instance, a more recent one and about photography specifically. In an informal way I do a bit of recommending to art buying individuals and groups around the country - you get a fascinating insight into motives and predilections; not quite American Psycho, but you'll know what I mean! Anyway, an absolutely consistent feature of this is, as Peter Peryer once said at a Sarjeant talk, you can't sell photographs in Auckland. You'd have more show with double beds in the Vatican. A dozen years ago I thought that this was just an aberration, but as it's continued I've been thinking about the reasons, and it seems to me that it goes back to the role that galleries can play. As most of those reading this will know, when he was Director of the Manawatu Art Gallery in the 1970s Luit Bieringa was one of the initiators of The Active Eye show. Right at the end of the '70s he went as Director to the then National Art Gallery, and throughout the 1980s made it national in practice and not just in name for the first time. With a small but dedicated staff he originated and maintained an extraordinarily vigorous and broad exhibition programme which, demonstrably, remains unsurpassed.

An integral part of this, and - importantly - on an equal footing, was a programme of photographic acquisitions, exhibitions and publications which signalled an institutional recognition of the medium's importance and relevance which an intelligent audience could not fail to be influenced by. Consequently, photographic exhibitions are a regular feature of both public and dealer gallery programmes, and there is a steady market for quality images. This is not the case in Auckland. Over the past 25 years the Auckland Art Gallery has hosted a number of touring shows, but it has generated relatively few, and none whatever that address historical aspects of NZ photography outside of solo exhibitions. There is not only a great need for this, but, in my experience, a great thirst for it among the public. There is a huge audience wanting to make sense of it, and the public institutions are failing miserably in this it seems to me. Te Papa, as an idea, was sold on the basis of there being five more times the exhibition space than the Buckle Steet building. Well, Our Place has been operating for three years now and there have been fewer exhibitions than over any comparable 3 years of the 1980s. The institution has a much larger staff and budget, and yet fewer shows. Since Te Papa opened there have been no photographic or photographic-related shows that, curatorially, make use of their collections. You can haul out chunks of Gordon Burt or Laurence Aberhart and stick them up for a couple of years, but any junior collection manager can do that. At this point, I guess, their "communications" people will haul out the over-played "elitist" card. Yeah, right. Well, all I can say is that anyone with a brain resents being treated like a moron, and, as the Polish proverb has it, the revenge will be terrible.