Exhibitions » Exhibition Archive » Hirschfeld Gallery Archive » I Last Saw You There—Andrew Ross
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Andrew Ross, Kids' room, 65a Holloway Rd, Wellington, 15/8/2007. Silver gelatin print. Image courtesy of the artist and Photospace Gallery, Wellington.
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Andrew Ross, Chinese Church, Frederick Street (plan 9 studios, reference room), 28/09/2007. Silver gelatin print. Image courtesy of the artist and Photospace Gallery, Wellington.
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Andrew Ross, Mark Crawford, 133a Holloway Road, 21/01/2008. Silver gelatin print. Image courtesy of the artist and Photospace Gallery, Wellington.
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Andrew Ross, Helter Skelter, Brighton Pier, August 2008. Silver gelatin print. Image courtesy of the artist and Photospace Gallery, Wellington.
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I Last Saw You There—Andrew Ross, installation view Hirschfeld Gallery, 2011. Photo: Andrew Beck.
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I Last Saw You There—Andrew Ross, installation view Hirschfeld Gallery, 2011. Photo: Andrew Beck.
I Last Saw You There—Andrew Ross
16 April - 15 May 2011 in the Hirschfeld Gallery
When Andrew Ross moved to Wellington in the 1980s he spent time walking around the city, making maps in his head. In the next decade he began to teach himself to take photographs, initially on a 1950s Agfa Clack, then on a 35mm camera, developing them in a home darkroom. These black and white pictures framed the places he had become familiar with as an unhurried and observant pedestrian. Since that time he has produced an extensive body of work, experimented with a range of and processes, and (since 1996) large format cameras, and retained the watchfulness that motivated those first pictures.
The bulk of Ross’ output looks at Wellington; major projects have included the documentation of the upper Cuba Street precinct affected by the bypass, Newtown, Mitcheltown in Te Aro Valley and the waterfront. Within this, workshops, factory basements, second-hand shop interiors and living spaces form a constant theme. Ross’ is a local eye which knows its subject intimately, and this relationship is always part of the work. People are found in their working habitats or homes, candid without appearing exposed, presented as expressions of their environments rather than the other way around.
Ross’ Wellington is an alternative city to the place most of us occupy every day. His images form a catalogue of the hidden; they focus on communities and settings which have to be looked for, known, or spent time with. Despite this, it is a common experience to recognise the sites: one has seen them in passing without consciously registering them. In this respect they form an unofficial recent history of urban Wellington, a catalogue of thousands of routes on foot, of places-in-passing rather than destinations.
The artist is also a great walker outside of the city, and photographs from tramping expeditions form a lesser known chapter of his work. A selection of these, taken across several trips, is included in the exhibition. People rarely feature in these works, where the main characters are makeshift huts on the verge of collapse, sites of former huts, sloping hills’ backbones and yawning ravines. These are wide open spaces, yet as private as pages of a book. They come together as a story of horizons, the cramped city-dwellers’ eye given scope to cast long lines. Impressionistic, they are not necessarily picturesque; non-views, the tramping images are more like journal entries, informal notes on incident and site.
Ross captures a city shedding layers of its skin, undergoing total change. Nothing we see in these photographs is new: it is a world of buildings and people orphaned by long-legged time. While his black and white medium suggests an earlier era, there is a startling disjuncture when we recognise that these pictures represent a very recent history. The artist is concerned to represent place as time, to show us how the geography of the city is as transitory as the people who move through it. His political act is that of discreetly making unnoticed things visible, making maps which are also epitaphs for places.
Further Reading
I Last Saw You There Brochure Text
Media Release