The Sky Remains the Same

McLeavey Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of The Sky Remains the Same, an exhibition of one of New Zealand’s most celebrated photographers, Laurence Aberhart, alongside New Zealand Forest's first official photographer, John Johns. Both Aberhart and Johns share the conviction that the camera's role is to bear witness, to insist upon what matters before it disappears. This exhibition will be accompanied by the haunting electroacoustic music of John Rimmer.

Aberhart's photographs are a sustained meditation on time, place and cultural history. His recurring subjects — cemeteries, war memorials, abandoned interiors — are all places where time has visibly accumulated. Quietly mysterious and unforgettably beautiful, his works document the architecture of colonialism in ruin and decay. Aberhart produces images using a hundred year old view camera which are steeped in the history not only of his subjects but also of his chosen medium.  Each print is deeply labour-intensive and unhurried. In an age of instant images, Aberhart's process insists on delay, on patience, on the image earning its existence. Rather than capturing change in motion, he freezes a moment in the long arc of decline, making the viewer acutely aware of what came before and what is being lost.

This exhibition consists of older negatives that have never been printed before, alongside newer works. Aberhart says “some of them have existed for a long while as memories of something I must make… All of which, essentially have never been seen before, not by a Wellington audience.”

Where Aberhart deals in the quiet melancholy of human-made things fading, Johns confronts a more active, urgent form of change. His broad collection of work conveys the fragility of nature and humanity's impact on it. As official photo­grapher for the New Zealand Forest Service from 1951-1984, his brief was to promote the principles of sustainable forestry. He said that “the feeling that forests are places of mystery and wonder was with me during my school years, when I would venture into the dark woods near my home. I’ve never forgotten that sense of mystery, and I try to find it in every forest I visit.” Although he was largely self-taught, technical excellence was a hallmark of Johns’ photography. He was meticulous regarding his equipment and his processing methods.

He witnessed firsthand the destruction wrought by clear-fell logging and made it his mission to document and oppose it. “Dare we look the next generation in the eye as we hand to them the heritage that we have made, and are making for them – a ravaged countryside?” Johns was a formalist and these works are not just beautifully composed images, but reflect his environmental concerns. His work included in this show captures his diversity of subject matter, including forest floor plants, land erosion and the natural world.

Both Aberhart and Johns race against time to record things that might disappear. But where Johns photographed change as something being done to the landscape, Aberhart photographs things already given over to time, resigned and still.