4 days ago
Time's arrow finds its mark
Comment: Across the numerous large-format, multi-panel photographs, some clocking in at over ten metres, that make up Adams career retrospective A Survey/He Kohinga Whakaahua at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki (until August 17) 'arrows' of whenua and event land with resonant twangs … from Dusky Sound to suburban Onehunga, from leafy Surrey to the blasted landscape of Mount Tarawera. History is re-animated, as centuries of dusty neglect collapse before our very eyes. The exhibition could be subtitled Revelations 1776 to 2025.
For Adams these pinpoint dates are the tip of the arrow, the key to entering this time-space continuum. Take 08.04.2002. At Hikiau Heiau. View to Ka'awaloa. Kealakekura Bay. Hawai'I as an example. The opening date represents the moment of image capture, when Adams stood on the foreshore with his cumbersome plate camera and tripod (more steampunk tech).
Mark Adams, 08.04.2002. At Hikiau Heiau. View to Kaʻawaloa. Kealakekua Bay. Hawaiʻi, 2002, colour inkjet prints, courtesy of the artist and Two Rooms, Auckland.
But the activating date we are being asked to witness is equally precise: February 4, 1779, when Captain Cook was killed on the shore of this picturesque bay 246 ago. The slaying of Cook was in retribution for the attempted kidnapping of an important ali'I nui (reigning chief) named Kalani'ōpu'u.
Call it what you like … cause and effect, two sides to every story, lost in translation or the inevitable chaos that arrives with the coloniser, in Adams' hands these images act as prompts for a searching enquiry into fractured pasts. And we find them boiling with myths and alternative facts yet ultimately and thankfully some home truths; no matter how galling or confronting these might be.
The exhibition opens with a supreme example of Adams' eye for the past still rattling away like the proverbial squeaky wheel. 1988. Hori Korei. George Grey monument. Albert Park. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland depicts the monument to Sir George Grey, twice Governor of Aotearoa New Zealand between 1845 and 1868 and Premier in the late 1870s, sans his stony head, in the immediate aftermath of its lopping during a Waitangi Day protest. 'Good Governor Grey' (the sculpture) has copped a bit of treatment over the years, most recently in 2020, when he was smeared with red paint as part of Black Lives Matter protests.
Mark Adams, 1988. Hori Korei. George Grey monument. Albert Park. Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, 1988, silver bromide print, courtesy of the artist.
These moments of ruptured pasts and presents are at their most elegiac in Adams' colour-saturated images of carved wharenui 'ki tāwahi' far away from the shores of Aotearoa and their original whenua and iwi. The whare Rauru (today in Hamburg) and Hinemihi (most recently standing on the Surrey estate of the former Earl of Onslow, another Governor of Aotearoa in the 1890s) were, in the 19th century, what contemporary Ngāti Pikaio carver Lyonel Grant describes as sitting between a whare tūpuna (ancestral house) and a whare tapere (place of entertainment)..
These ornately carved houses were on the front line of Aotearoa's nascent tourism industry in Rotorua, welcoming guests from all over the world to the thermal wonderlands of the Pink and White Terraces and Whakarewarewa. Te Arawa leaders such Āporo Te Wharekānewha of Tūhourangi were amongst Aotearoa's founding tourism entrepreneurs building hotels and welcoming guests to the sulphurous attractions of 'Hotwaterland'. Adams photographs capture the legacies, at home and abroad, of the boom in whakairo carving that this first wave of tourism was a catalyst for. Hinemihi and Rauru were the creations of some of Aotearoa's great carvers in the period 1870 to 1930 – Wero Tāroi, Tene Waitere, Anaha Te Rāhui and Neke Kapua. In Aotearoa terms, a dream team of talent that can be compared to 1500s Rome when Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were painting up a storm.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, installation view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2025 including works depicting Samoan Tatau. Photo: Joanna Wright
Examples of their mahi toi still adorn many wharenui in the Te Arawa region or in museum collections, but today at the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki we can see Hinemihi and Rauru, and their majestic carvings, in all their glory in Adams large format photographs. In their assiduous documentation, Adams images speak for themselves, but they also perform the vital act of adding to the mana of their creators, ensuring that their names are as canonical here as Michelangelo in Italy.
In 2025 we can also marvel not just at the skill and artistry of the carved works but ponder on the quirks of circumstance, the global trade in whakairo in the early 20th century: a strange brew of Pākehā patronage and commercial opportunism that provided the licence financially and conceptually for the carvers of the past to create these legacy masterpieces. The role of these whare in the world is significant to iwi Māori today. Contemporary carver Grant has described them as, 'a piece of Te Arawa history. It's really, really important that (referring to Rauru) it's representing Māori people in a land where Māori people are valued and admired, as they are by the Germans … the best ambassador we could ever have.'
Back home in Onehunga or Mangere, Adams' methodology results in photographs that capture what I think of as 'timeliness'. They are not timeless because his images are so forensic in their detail, no woozy soft-focus here folks, or contain so many markers of specific time such as fashion hints, sideburns or a strategically placed box of Dominion Bitter.
Adams' visual essays on Samoan Tatau from the 1970s to the present, here in Aotearoa and further afield in Europe, are intimate tableau of skin, blood and ink set in suburban living rooms. For five decades Adams has followed the Samoan Tufuga Tatatau (tattoo master) Su'a Sulu'ape Paolo II from Tāmaki to apartments in Eindhoven and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Recipients including many young Samoan men, and none other than the painter Tony Fomison, proudly display the during and after of the gruelling tatau ritual, surrounded by a support crew of whānau and friends. Via Adams' lens we join them as they follow their forbears in taking the Pe'a on 10.05.1980 at Grotto Road, Onehunga or 30.06.1986. Chalfont Crescent. Māngere.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, installation view, Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, 2025 depicting the 11 panel panoramic work 27.06.2014 to 01.07.2014. Nine Fathoms Passage. After William Hodges Waterfall in Dusky Bay with a Māori Canoe, 1776. Tamatea Dusky Sound. Te Waipounamu South Island. Photo: Joanna Wright
Adams' patient process is determined in large measure by his choice of equipment, a large format-plate camera which requires much wrangling and set-up for that one shot. In this regard his work over five decades stands as the most potent antidote to the brutalising avalanche of doctored, tweaked AI slop ricocheting about in the poor old Cloud. An Adams photograph is anchored within its chosen cultural context facilitating a contemporary resonance today and a clear pathway into the future, in striking contrast to the digital mayfly trolleries that rogue algorithms fling at us unbidden 24/7.
Perhaps the best example of time's arrow finding its mark with a shuddering thud is the largest work in the exhibition, the 11-panel panorama dating to 2014 entitled Nine Fathoms Passage. X really does mark the spot here, in terms of both time and place. The time being late March 1773 when Captain Cook arrived in Dusky Sound on his second voyage to Aotearoa aboard the Resolution. This moment was memorialised by the official artist on the voyage William Hodges.
Adams elegantly plays on points of view, his 360-degree panorama imagining the complete aspect to and of mana whenua, complete with snow-capped peaks, arcing rainbow and a plunging waterfall … 100 percent pure New Zealand. History painting and photography collide in this great frieze to thrilling effect. There is a touch of theatre here, Adams captures iconic Dusky Sound as time's arrow lands in the moment before the Resolution rounds the headland. The rest, as they say, is history.
Across the 65 images that make up the exhibition, the selections made by the curatorial team of the late Ron Brownson, who died in 2023, and Dr Sarah Farrar, head of curatorial and learning, we experience the great historical narratives of Aotearoa and wider Polynesia and see anew them ever evolving on a trajectory into the future.
Brownson, who was responsible for the first institutional acquisitions of Adams' work in 1995, also framed a written lens to articulate why so many find his images, ostensibly documentary photography, so stirring and culturally nourishing. In Brownson's view Adams is not so much a documentary photographer but a 'conceptual photographer' his images being 'a visual artefact of evidence'.
Adams' 'proof' is precise and profound. And, like time's arrow, invariably finds its target.
Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua, until August 17 at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.
