Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau: Women and Photography Māreikura Whakaahua
by Lissa Mitchell

‘Transgressive intimacy’ is the term Slow Burn author Lissa Mitchell, Te Papa curator of historical photography, chooses to describe Anne Noble’s 1980s photo-suite Nighthawks which records a nocturnal sequence of desire. Whether inchoate or explicit, this is the grand theme of Slow Burn. Much of the imagery selected speaks to the potent aptitude of the camera for mapping the interiors, fantasies or enigmas of the hungry heart. This requires an alternative framing wherein the documentary facility of the lens is eschewed in favour of meditative, filmic tableau informed by psychic or emotive investments the photographer makes in locating or celebrating such intimacies.

There is a humid, languorous tone to many of the Slow Burn images, testimony to a conceptual gestation period and what Mitchell describes as ‘the slow gathering of knowledge and material objects (in this case photography) that at a certain point becomes a moment of certainty – it kind of sneaks up on you.’  A case in point is Christine Webster’s sumptuous dance from the Black Carnival series of the early 1990s.

Black carnival #15, Christine Webster, 1993. Cibachrome prints, 2600 x 2400 mm. Purchased 2007. Te Papa (O.030647/A-B).

This was conceived during her 1991 Frances Hodgkins Fellowship. Webster takes as her inspiration the abandonments of gender-bending play depicted on the walls of the Roman Villa of Mysteries from Pompeii and infuses such ‘Bal du Mask’ fantasies with a dash of night-club burlesque for the late 20^th century. #15 inhabits an interstitial space between consciousness and reverie whilst the artefact itself is a magnificent example of that most glamourous of photographic media: the glowing cibachrome. A glossy billboard from the underworld.

Te Papa Press has been on a photo-book roll in recent years. See my recent reviews for Leslie Adkin, Farmer Photographer (2024) by Te Papa curator photography Athol McCredie, and Mitchell’s wider history of women’s photography in Aotearoa, Through Shaded Glass (2023). I suggested in that review that the many years of research required for Through Shaded Glass ‘will no doubt create a legacy in its own right, as a point of departure for future scholarship.’ That overarching study is now bearing fruit as Mitchell burrows into Te Papa’s vast photographic archive.

Those other two books leant on chronology and the more traditional book structures of time, place or biography. Slow Burn rotates around four intuitively articulated chapters that allow for the author’s personal interpretations to be porous, juxtaposed and open to a diversity of gender affiliations, time phases and nuanced relationships between practitioners and their subject matter.

The third chapter, ‘Ancestor Technologies’, takes its title from a suite of century old family glass-plate negatives re-contextualised for the digital era by artist Stella Brennan (2023), interrogating the concept of circular history unfolding in a serial fashion via artist’s books or suites of narrative-based images. This means time – and, by implication, history – is not trapped within chronologies but is activated as a connecting link to lineages of family, gender or tribal history, invigorating these bonds to inform future possibilities, desires and longed-for outcomes. These revivals can then point to ancient knowledge systems. Ann Shelton, for example, ‘revives plant-based knowledge, particularly its deep connections to women’s health and healing.’

An artist’s photobook is laboured over meticulously by artist and design team and then released – often self-published – in limited editions, largely for the photographic community. But such tenuous and time-consuming methodologies also carry a steeliness of resolve and the ambition of an expanded narrative that aligns with ventures such as documentary film. A recent example is Virginia Were’s An intimacy of long unfolding which exemplifies that very Slow Burn that Mitchell proposes as a sweet spot for women’s photography: a space for ‘play, performativity, materiality and intimacy.’

Virginia Were, An Abominable Mystery. Page spread from self-published photobook An intimacy of long unfolding, 294 x 224 x 5 mm. Purchased 2024. Te Papa (RB001686).Purchased 2024. Te Papa (RB001686).

Were’s midden of used gloves throws us a bit of a feint. Surely this pile, posing as a rubbery hydrangea-like splay, is a memorial to or artefact from the COVID pandemic. I checked with the artist. No, these gloves are waste from the process of making the metal tracks for heavy machinery such as excavators. After a short life as an engineering accomplice, their sunny blueness is destined for landfill and a long-term geological consequence that is hard to fathom. Were’s examination of such brief industrial lives, as contrasted with the thousand and even million-year spans of their sorry existence as refuse, is the conceptual centre of An intimacy of long unfolding in book form, which won the student category of the Australia and New Zealand Photobook awards in 2024.

Mitchell is curator of the exhibition Slow Burn: Women and Photography/Ahi Tāmau: Māreikura Whakaahua that opened March 1 at Te Papa Tongarewa, Te Whanghanui-a-Tara, Wellington. She writes:

Some people might ask: why do we need a women only exhibition? Through Shaded Glass and Slow Burn exist to show how binary and gender biased the art and photography worlds – and the collecting and preservation of artists legacies – have been (still are?)

This did not seem an overly pressing issue, given the wealth of publishing in and around women’s art and photography in recent years. Then I turned to page 193 and saw the arresting portrait of the artist Joanna Paul by photographer Adrienne Martyn dating to 1983. It’s a heartbreaker.

Joanna Paul, painter, Dunedin. Feb.’83, Adrienne Martyn, 1983. Gelatin silver print, 247 x 144 mm. Purchased 1985 with New Zealand Lottery Board funds. Te Papa (O.003443).

The politics of artist couples and their negotiated engagement with the wider culture is where Slow Burn makes a powerful case – as a stand-alone restorative and a mediated space for the intimacies that Mitchell identifies as a gendered narrative across time and generations of creative practice. Joanna Margaret Paul (1945–2003) will be known to many art followers in Aotearoa as a key protagonist in numerous portraits and family tableau from the 1970s by her then-husband, painter Jeffrey Harris. It has only been recently, more than a decade after her passing, that she has been accorded the degree of attention that her considerable artistic achievements warrant. The touring exhibition Joanna Margaret Paul: Imagined in the Context of a Room, a curatorial collaboration between Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the Sarjeant Gallery Te Whare o Rehua Whanganui, reveals Paul to be a far-sighted multi-disciplinary artist across media including painting, film, photography and poetry. Martyn’s portrait captures Paul in contemplative mood, eyes averted, simultaneously self-aware and retreating from the enquiry of the lens.

As a photograph it is a tightly composed interplay of monochromatic shifts. Dense darks of hair and cardigan meld into deep shadows. This blanket of black contrasts with marble-like sculptural highlights illuminating her features. Hers is a fascinating face. In the mid 2020s as her biography and mahi toi enters the public consciousness anew, this moment of reticence, can be read as emblematic of the long game that Slow Burn embodies, one in which the future as a putative locus of consideration and engagement, can be seen as a wahi tapu – a sacred space of hope – that many female practitioners anticipated, even when their ‘present’ was marginalised and isolated.

Since 2000, women’s photography has benefitted from a greater degree of curatorial attention and audience capacity. One of the catalysts for this was Yvonne Todd winning the inaugural Walters Prize in 2002. Whilst examples of her work are a notable omission from Slow Burn, amongst the fifty photographers surveyed key elements of her wider practice are revealed, as something of a gateway, two decades after that seminal moment.

Whanganui-based Tia Ranginui rewires the tropes of the film still, fashion photography and established art-directed wide-screen tableau as seen in the work of international photographers such as Justine Kurland or Gregory Crewdson. Ranginui’s work serves personal, regional and iwi narratives or mythical pūrākau, and has resulted in some of the most compelling photographic mise-en-scene images produced in Aotearoa in recent years.

The intellectual WEALTH of a savage mind, Tia Ranginui, 2015.Pigment print, 800 x 1200 mm. Purchased 2024. Te Papa (O.052213).

Her Savage Mind works – positioning Matauranga Māori as the central intellectual tradition of Aotearoa – are populated with sprites, magic mists and compelling actors, sometimes within the context of the marae. It is testimony to the ingenuity of Ranginui, like most of her fellow travellers in the constructed-reality arena in Aotearoa, that she conjures these seductive scenes without the production budgets of her international counterparts. All over Aotearoa, Slow Burn reveals, from the Invercargill playgrounds co-opted by Nela Fletcher to Natalie Robertson’s own ancestral ūkaipō near Waiapu on the East Coast, ringatoi wāhine photographers have been enriching our landscapes and their practice by externalising the capacity for whenua to act as an atamira or stage for all manner of ritual or playful transgressions.

One of the legacy outcomes of Slow Burn is the platform it offers for lesser-known figures. Some of these have been only tangentially associated with the market and dealer gallery system over the ambit of the book, the last four decades. Others may have practiced in an art context for a short period of time or avoided it altogether. In other cases, even these aspects of biography are fugitive. Over this and project and Through Shaded Glass Mitchell has proven herself to be the most intuitive and determined researcher; nimble and sure-footed. Locating and resuscitating the almost forgotten could be described as her curatorial love language.

The final section of Slow Burn, ‘About the Makers’, contains fascinating biographical information on the fifty photographers whose work the book contains. It was there that I discovered that Taranaki photographer and writer Victoria Ginn was the producer of a major photographic essay The Spirited Earth: Dance, myth and ritual from South-East Asia to the South Pacific published by Rizzoli International in 1990.

Still life, Victoria Ginn, c.1986/1993. Cibachrome print, 406 x 507 mm. Purchased 1993 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds. Te Papa (O.003947).

A little further digital digging revealed glowing reviews in the Sunday Times (London) and, stern Magazine (Hamburg), as well as from other magazines in New York and Paris. Her image Still Life is located much closer to home, in a landscape I know well – Te Piha on Tāmaki’s west coast. I’ve clambered over those rocks hundreds of times. Ginn transforms the intertidal foreshore into a swoonsome stage, ideal for the performative intimacies that Mitchell suggests are the ties that bind the disparate threads of Slow Burn into a substantial whole.