4 Photographers - Photospace Gallery 12th-29th June 2015

Sue Guest - Green Corridor: Tracks in Wellington’s Bush

Just minutes from Lambton Quay and the Beehive are small pockets of bush. Taken in the summer of 2014/15, these panoramic images seek to capture the dark and brooding essence of the New Zealand bush.

Photo: Sue Guest

Mary Hutchinson - 3 Cities

Washington DC, USA; Generally, being a white, European middle aged female, I spent more time assessing situations in USA (and to a lesser extent London ) than I would in Wellington, so as to feel safe & comfortable approaching people to photograph them, especially given the high frequency of gun carriage. Also I had less familiarity with all cultural and ethnic sub-groups there, and initially almost no knowledge of local suburban history. Due to having a poor sense of direction & not carrying a smart phone, I also had to be careful not to get lost when wandering and observing in overseas cities.

The two other cities photographed were London and Wellington.

Photo: Mary Hutchinson

Photo: Mary Hutchinson

Gil Eva Craig - Landscapes
Land and form, Central Otago, New Zealand.

Photo: Gil Eva Craig

Photo: Gil Eva Craig

Photo: Gil Eva Craig

Zara Emma Pears - Ephemerality

Ephemerality explores the subconscious movement from the physical world into the world of the dream and reflects on the nature of existence and mortality.

'Again, no one is sure apart from faith that,  whether he is awake or asleep, seeing that during sleep we believe that we are awake as firmly as we do when we are awake. We believe is spaces, figures, movements; as we experience the passage of time, we measure it; and in fact we behave just as we are awake. We spend half our life asleep, in which condition, as we ourselves admit, we have no idea of truth, whatever we imagine, since all our perceptions are illusory. Who knows, therefore, whether the other half of live, in which we believe ourselves awake, is not another dream, slightly different from the first from which we awake when we suppose ourselves asleep?

'If we dreamt in company of dreams, as often happens, chanced to agree, and if we spent our waking hours in solitude, who doubts that in such a case we should believed matters reversed? Finally, as we often dream that we are dreaming, and thus add one dream to another, life itself is only a dream upon which other dreams are grafted and from which we awake at death, a dream during which we have as few principals of truth and goodness as during natural sleep, these different thoughts which disturb us being perhaps mere illusions, like the flight of time and the empty fancies of our dreams.'
- From Pascal's Pensées- unfinished at his death 1669.

Zara Emma Pears is a Wellington-based, Christchurch-born photo-artist specialising in expanding the emotional and conceptual range within portraiture. Ephemerality is her second exhibition.
Thanks are due to James and John at Photospace, Jordyn O’keeffe, Michael Edge-Perkins and Jaymee Morrison. 

Photo: Zara Emma Pears

Photo: Zara Emma Pears

These 4 exhibitions, and several other projects yet to be exhibited, have come out of Photocourse NZ's Photocourse 4, which ran from mid-2014 and into 2015 as an extended, project-based programme, tutored by John Williams and James Gilberd.
PC4 will be offered next in 2016-17.  www.photocoursenz.com