Giving Up the Ghost

Michael Hirschfeld Gallery, City Gallery Wellington.

15 May – 15 June 2003

for group exhibition Set Up.

This work uses photographs from Auckland City Library’s Clifton Firth collection.

Clifton Firth (1904-1980) was a leading mid 20th century New Zealand photographer whose Hollywood-inspired glamour portraits document leading local writers, actors, artists and academics of the time, as well as World War II servicemen and ordinary New Zealanders. The deteriorated historical proof-prints re-photographed in this body of work are not available to the general public. They were always intended to deteriorate when exposed to light to ensure enlargements would be ordered from Firth’s studio. They will, in time, disappear completely.

In this work I have selected two portraits from the collection, which, when exhibited side by side, imply a relationship between the two sitters that in reality did not exist.

In 2001 this work was also exhibited in the window of fashion store, Stella Gregg, High Street, Central Auckland, not far from Clifton Firth’s original photographic studio.