Conor Clarke and Bridget Reweti.

Since its inception, photography has played a pivotal role in shaping the ways that we picture place. Landscape photography, in particular, helped to construct early settler-colonial imaginings of ‘New Zealand,’ utilising newly invented technologies to frame and disseminate idealised landscape views. Site Seeing brings together the work of contemporary Māori photographic artists Conor Clarke (Ngāi Tahu, Scottish, Welsh) and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi), to consider these introduced modes of picturing the land around us.  

Site Seeing draws our attention to the artifice of the notion of ‘landscape,’ making apparent the ways it has been constructed through physical, photographic, and digital means. It offers, instead, Māori ways of seeing site. Through their ongoing exploration of the photographic medium, Clarke and Reweti interrogate historical tropes and technologies, drawing attention to the role the colonial gaze has played in shaping non-indigenous human relationships to place. By turning their lens to familiar sites – such as Ka Whatu Tu o Rakihouia the Kaikōura Ranges and the lakes of Te Rua o te Moko Fiordland – Clarke and Reweti encourage us to reconsider the ways we see the land and the ways we imagine our relationship to it.