Creative exposure of love, wonder & desire
Image: by Michael Ng from Wonder

Six exhibitions opened during the first fortnight of Creative Exposure, Auckland's first photography festival. But the festival's three exhibitions on love, romance, wonder and desire were saved for last!
Creative exposure of love, wonder & desire
Image: by Michael Ng from Wonder

Six exhibitions opened during the first fortnight of Creative Exposure, Auckland's first photography festival. But the festival's three exhibitions on love, romance, wonder and desire were saved for last!

Photographs and paintings exploring the theme of human desire feature in the Ardor Gallery exhibition, Desire (June 19-July 1).

Rebecca Swan's photography is predominantly black and white and often explores sexuality and gender. Desire will include some Swan images that seek to show authentically the ideal of same sex attraction without conforming to heterosexual views of how that should be presented erotically. Some of the Swan's Desire images also feature in her forthcoming book, Assume Nothing, due to be published internationally in August. Swan has exhibited in New Zealand, Australia, Germany and Britain, was involved in the internationally recognised M.I.L.K project, and her first book, The Big C, won her fans on both sides of the Tasman.

A large photographic mural, Jen is one of Swan's most striking images in the Desire exhibition. It demonstrates Swan's interest in dispelling the easy categorization in photography of masculine or feminine attributes by combining sensuous 'feminine' curves and a more tense, 'masculine' fist. "The key thing is to have a visual language for women who have sex with women that is erotic and distinctive to their sexuality. Jen and much of my work is about the fluidity between the masculine and the feminine imbued in one individual. I'm exploring and challenging generalizations about men and women. As a queer photographer I am interesting in exploring an erotic aesthetic, one that uses the specifics of that sexuality. I want them to be strong, not overly romanticized photographs."

Developing this aesthetic can mean Swan's work is seen as controversial. "It's a hard place to put yourself as an artist," she says, "it can be problematic. I attempted to place these images somewhere other than within existing categories of erotica or pornography but recognize they will be read differently by audiences, depending on their sexuality."

Swan says the best images remain powerful despite how often they're looked at. "If they're really good, time doesn't decrease that effect. I lived with the Jen image, looked at it every day, and loved it. It never became wallpaper. I'm looking forward to seeing it again on a gallery wall."

The New Zealand Idle exhibition (BNZ Foyer, Aotea Centre, June 20-27) illustrates how the media's photographical portrayal of love sells the idea short.

In her series, New Zealand Idle: The Woman I Love, Lang Ea examines the male perspective of love, so often portrayed in the media as the domain of women and romance. "In the weekly magazines, love is all about finding a man, keeping him, how make a relationship work. TV shows project women competing for the single eligible male and the media generally use photography to support these ideas."

Lang Ea describes love as "an idle pursuit" and says her photographs parody popular media by decoding or deconstructing the language and illusions of photography. "The way we are represented in the media [and] the ideals that are provided tells us how we should look, live and love.The Woman I Love series takes a critical look at the love aspect of our cosmopolitan society. The drama and tribulation of 'love' is, to most people, a mystery. Rather than explaining love the media encourages notions and cliches such as, 'you will know when you feel it '.

Lang Ea says the commercial imagery of love has made such a massive incursion in our lives that the concept has become, to many, a very 'idle' subject. "And because media portrayals of love seldom reflect a male perspective, the idea becomes even less relevant. My interest is not to find the meaning of love but to find if my subjects - male participants - will reveal from their perspective to us, the audience educated by popular media, what we have anticipated is love."

The 18-photo series features two portraits each of nine couples, with Lang Ea taking what she describes as "a personality portrait" of the male partner and a second image, taken by the male partner, using a disposable camera of the woman he loves.Creative Exposure is an

Wonder (Artstation, from June 22) features five photographers' diverse responses to the idea of wonder and incorporates a variety of image making processes.

All the photographers involved will create new works for the exhibition, including Julie Downie's large format prints that emulate nineteenth century microscopic photography and reveal some of nature's unexpected richness and the detail that normally eludes the naked eye.

Darryl Fausett's planned installation will employ cyanotype (blueprint imaging) within preserving jars of everyday objects "reframed to become strange or remarkable".

Fashion and its role in creating identity underpins Michael Ng's photographs that show designers - including Nic Blanchet and Francis Hooper , modeling fashion items that express their cultural background. Richard Walton's series will focus on his own experience of wonder.

Poet/photographer Ann Poulsen curates and contributes to Wonder, with works that show how language can add to an image's meaning. Poulsen promises an aesthetic experience, with two series planned, one on "imaginary beings from the museum of the marvelous" and a second series on Flora, using alternative processing. Poulsen expects public interest in Wonder to centre on its subject matter, i.e. how the contributing photographers have revealed the world in new ways, with other photographers interested in the image-making processes employed. This will be canvassed during a planned Artists' Talk on June 26 at 1.30.