with photo

last man standing / Hon Jim Anderton Parliament Steps

at Home with hester GAScoigne / Canberra

Ian Johnstone, tony simpson & Barbara Strathdee / ATL

tony’s stairs / sydney 2026

Christmas Day / Taranaki Street

Hollywood hotel / phillip island

post office circa 1850 / windsor melbourne

Fijian flying circus / wellington

collins st 5pm by john brack / NGV melbourne

harlem renaissance art show / The Met NYC

The Barracks for the ‘Aliens’ during WW2 / Matiu Island NZ

Philip Clairmont, david parkyn, Nigel brown & SCG / whanganui

david Parkyn & tony fomison / lake taupo

Alan Preston and Daniel Clasby / Fingers workshop

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WHAT WE SAW

Exhibition review of Photographs of Sally Griffin 1975 - A Decade @ Photospace Gallery, Wellington

Vivian Maier comes to mind with these photographs of Sally Griffin - David Alsop Suite Galleries

Reviewed by Angela Middleton

1975 was a seminal year, as the current ‘History in the Taking: 40 Years of PhotoForum’ exhibition in Wellington’s City Gallery informs us. It was an equally significant year for me, the year I joined PhotoForum (the organisation John B. Turner founded to promote photography as an art form) and the year I developed a number of significant friendships. Among these friends was Sally Griffin, recently arrived from Melbourne where she had just completed a Higher Diploma of painting and drawing. These were idealistic, formative times.

I was recently in Wellington for the retrospective of Sally Griffin’s black and white photographs taken since that same year, 1975. These are equally ‘history in the taking’ and should be viewed alongside the PhotoForum exhibition: the two overlap with a brilliant synergy and many of Griffin’s images are equally photography as art form. Moreover, Griffin’s photographs demonstrate a warmth, personality and political awareness sometimes lacking in the PhotoForum show. Some of the same subjects appear in both places, while at least one photographer from PhotoForum appears as subject in Griffin’s photographs, as do other creative artists, several of whom are no longer with us: the filmmaker Merata Mita, then a young woman, lounges inside a tent during a break in the filming at Waitangi; Phil Clairmont’s young son, Orlando, tries on Dad’s sunglasses; he, Nigel Brown, David Parkyn and Sally lie in long grass beside the Whanganui River, en route to Jerusalem and a visit to the grave of James Baxter. Tony Fomison seems very much himself in a portrait, but in the next image is dwarfed beside one of his huge mural paintings. An image of playwright, Dean Parker, is beautifully composed and enigmatic; and a young poet with long blonde hair, Peter Olds, stands beside a life-size Coke advertisement in Freemans Bay.

Griffin’s photographs document turbulent political events of the times, as she joins a group of people on a lonely road marching into Kaikohe to protest The Treaty is a Fraud and Jim Anderton was a newly-elected Auckland City Councillor who found himself leading an unexpected protest of thousands reacting to overstayer dawn raids. These images are full of history and narrative: the exodus of the hippie era from the streets of Ponsonby, as a patient woman and a barefoot hirsute man (Leo Thompson) stand beside their Austin A40 and a trailer overloaded with mattresses and household stuff, about to leave the inner city forever; I find myself on the wall as an unrecognisable wraith with a white face, symbolic of European presence, perhaps a kehua, in an indigenous landscape. A crack along the floor, about to split the space on which I stand. Another wraith with a white face stands in an anonymous, dark, semi-Victorian interior: but one which only I can recognise as once the artist’s painting studio, a vast but not grand atelier from our seminal year of 1975.

Viewed from the lofty distance of 2015, these images have the pervading innocence and optimism of those times. Who would have thought, back then, that we were creating history? But this was the case. I look forward to seeing Sally’s new paintings, her other preferred medium, one of which has been commissioned to be in Wellington’s 150th Anniversary exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in June. Her painting of Wellington Radicals is called ‘You’re Not in London Now!’.

May 2015

During the 1970s photography was Angela Middleton’s chief interest and she was the first woman to exhibit with the newly-formed PhotoForum group. In 1976, she and Sally Griffin were members of a committee that edited and produced ‘Fragments of a World’, a book of contemporary New Zealand’s women’s photography. Angela then went on to become an archaeologist and honorary research fellow in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Otago. She was also a consultant archaeologist and her book, ‘Pewhairangi – Bay of Islands Missions and Māori 1814 – 1845’, was published in November 2014. She died in 2019.

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