Neil Pardington - Elsewhere

11 March - 9 April 2000 in the Hirschfeld Gallery

Amy was with her father when he died. She was with her mother too, although Mrs Tait died at Amy’s sister’s place. But before she died she gave us the mattress on which her husband did. Die. She couldn’t bear to sleep on it apart. And now tonight is our last night.

. . .

‘What was it like?’ I ask.

‘He sighed,’ she says. ‘I held his hand, he turned his head and sighed and that was it. I drew his lids over his eyes – which I’d seen in movies and read about in books. But when you actually do it everything falls silent, like you’re turning down the volume on the world.’

I kiss her mouth which tastes of chalk.

‘We should give this mattress to Carmel,’ she says. ‘She could put it in Tyler’s room.’

With its finest hour in the American 1920s and 1930s, straight photography was understood until comparatively recently to tell the truth of the world. Its characteristically gritty black and white images of everyday life attempted to capture life directly as it was apprehended, a pattern of timeless moments without artifice or trickery or construction. Seen today as a photographic style as much as any other, straight photography has undergone a recent revival of interest among contemporary photographers. Taken with a handheld camera in available light, Neil Pardington’s raw black and white Hemingway-style photographs are straight photographs with a twist. Like other contemporary photographers, Pardington uses straight photography’s discredited objectivity as a way to communicate the subjective realities of contemporary life. His images tell small stories; they are not so much about capturing the current moment as attempting to recall the past.

The images in Elsewhere depict the talismanic objects of Pardington’s New Zealand childhood—swimming pools, balloons, old mattresses in baches and caravans. But rather than recording a distinctly New Zealand vernacular—a sense of being here as opposed to anywhere else—these images are about the impossibility of ever going back home again. There is a sense in Elsewhere of having returned only to have missed the party; here the balloons are deflating, the mattresses are stained, the lights are going out. It’s over. A melancholy stillness pervades Pardington’s images which exude a feeling of things not as they were then, but as they are now.