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Sport 30: Peter Black-Real Fiction
The Reflection of the Photographer in the Shopwindow Takes a Picture of the Photographer
The Reflection of the Photographer in the Shopwindow Takes a Picture of the Photographer
What or who precisely is the persona, the shaping personality or fictional character orchestrating both the order and chaos of these images? If the New Zealand male photographer—from Alfred Burton to Eric Lee Johnson to Robin Morrison—tends to be thought of as a man of action, these photographs draw us towards a more discreet presence, a non-demonstrative, resolutely private figure. Walker Evans's oft-quoted comment on Eugene Atget will hold for the ‘street photographer’ Peter Black as well: ‘His general note is lyrical understanding of the street, trained observation of it, special feeling for patina, eye for revealing detail, over all of which is thrown a poetry which is not “the poetry of the street” … but the projection of Atget's person.’
Peter Black sees the kinds of things we all see. He ventures onto the construction site in ‘Sites’ much the same way a curious neighbour or a child might. He is not the Man Alone of New Zealand tradition—rather the curious bystander. Art, then, is not a form of privilege; if anything it underlines the earthliness and earthbound-nature of everyday life. Yet the images remain, somehow, intensely his.