Title: The Place Where They Live

Author: Gregory O'Brien

In: Sport 30: Peter Black-Real Fiction

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, March 2003

Part of: Sport

Conditions of use

Animal World

Not surprisingly for a photographer whose camera is so frequently trained on the ground, animals have been a frequent subject in Peter's work. Since the early days of print advertising and the mass media, animals have been incessantly co-opted into commercials as metaphors for aspects of the human psyche—so National Bank's black horse is the ‘free spirit’, elsewhere the big cat is metaphor for both sports car and sexual predator; the loyal dog will do as a mascot for all manner of life insurance. A flock of formation-flying sea-birds becomes an Air New Zealand logo…For years a depressed looking goldfish coasted around television screens nationwide, as the figurehead (if that's the right word) for New Zealand on Air. And Telecom New Zealand corralled just about the entire animal kingdom then set them to music as an endorsement for evening rates. In Peter Black's work of the early 1980s—particularly ‘Fifty Photographs’ and a series of colour images from 1984 [pp2, page 59 5–8]—animals or representations of animals are particularly numerous: a stuffed kitten has replaced a child in a pram (Berhampore School Fair II, Wellington), a black dog, tongue dangling, shares lawn with a writhing infant (Baby, Summer City, Wellington). Not surprisingly, the menagerie that stampedes through the photographs of Peter Black is unsettlingly, relievedly different from the adman's zoo.

In the background of Peter Black's Marineland, Napier, from ‘Fifty Photographs’, a Noah's ark-like procession of native birds faces left while, to our right, a receptionist/office worker shuffles paper. A crazed piece of real or fake foliage unfurls towards the newspaper stand and umbrella handles that separate us from the scene. This is the ‘institution’ into which the series takes us: an unnatural version of the ‘natural’ world, in which (to follow the series for a moment, frame by frame):

• 21 a fluffy dog drinks from a tap
• 22 a concrete kangaroo (with joey) is caught in the headlights of a car
• 23 an alsatian stares from the back window of a Mercedes
• 24 a teeshirted, person-sized pink panther crosses its legs in the back of a panel-van
• 25 a coin operated Mustang Stallion awaits its rider…
• 27 a fake pig sits in a wheelbarrow
• 28 a giant kiwi looms above a Palmerston North department store
• 29 two children are dressed in rabbit outfits…

Marineland, Napier, 1981, from ‘Fifty Photographs’

page 60 The opposite of the ad-agency's dreamy, idealised versions, Peter's real and manufactured animals manifest the most fallible, absurd characteristics of humanity. They are imbued with the tragic, the ambivalent, the nonsensical and the sad. With their deflated romanticism, they bring to mind William Burroughs's observation that even the most marvellous dream, when recounted, becomes like ‘a stuffed animal set on the floor of a bank’. Reality, itself, the photographs seem to be implying, is made of such decommissioned dreams.

Peter Black's animal subjects are often human-made: hand-sewn or of badly poured concrete; their habitats are the backs of cars and vans, shopping centres and the crazed rural ritual of A & P shows. Make of this what you will. A fluffy dog peers from a china shop window [p2]. Perhaps Man's best friend also seems, at times, his most compliant victim.

But then animals are also capable of various forms of revenge, the choicest of which is a pristine indifference. Generally, Peter Black's animals are oblivious to humanity, although, in Waihau Bay, 1986, a black dog muzzles up to his camera lens. In fact, if the photographs are anything to go by, dogs seem to quite like him. It's the humans who stare or give him the fingers.