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Sport 30: Peter Black-Real Fiction
Almost Nothing
Almost Nothing
Some of Peter Black's best known photographs were taken during the Springbok Tour protests in 1981: protestors hoisting a crucifix on the rugby park in Hamilton, the battered bearers of battered placards resting beside an Auckland hedge, the charge of the Red Squad past an overturned police car.
This afternoon, Peter saunters uncomfortably about the darkroom. He says he has probably lost the Springbok Tour negatives. Not that this worries him. His lack of attachment to these images stems, I suspect, from the fact they unsettle his notion of photography, their subject matter overriding any interest they might have for him as photographic prints. He would build something from almost nothing, rather than take a huge, public event or personage and reduce it to a black and white print. Peter would have the image generate its own private narrative rather than stand its ground as public record. The photograph, then, is a point of origin rather than a terminus, a catalyst rather than something in which the world is reduced or summarised.