Subritzky Inward Goods and Freight Wharf (looking North), Auckland, 20/01/2008, 6.22 (Blur)

Subritzky Inward Goods and Freight Wharf, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 26/09/2007 6.17 (Shinning Roves)

Subritzky Inward Goods and Freight Wharf (looking East), Wynyard Point, Auckland, 13/01/2008, 6.28 (Plastic Bag)

Daldy Street, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 25/12/2007, 6.09 (Smudged Clouds)

Hamer Street, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 07/10/2007, 6.55 (Golden City)

Jellicoe and Daldy Street Corner, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 12/01/2008, 6.25 (Curved Tire Marks)

Si C'est (If It Is)
2006-2007

Si C’est (if it is) is a writing/photography collaboration based on sustained investigation of a specific urban site: Wynyard Point (also known as the Tank Farm), part of Auckland’s industrial waterfront.

This project aims to explore and disrupt the subjectivities implicit in both writing and photography. At first glance, the photographer represents a ‘recording’ subjectivity (the object must be there, in front of the camera), while the writer represents a ‘controlling’ one (every feature of a text is the product of a decision). However, after Adorno the distinction breaks down: to record is to control, and subjectivity is always controlling. In Fiona Amundsen’s overtly structured and highly disciplined method, the control is turned back on the viewing subject itself. The site viewed is shown devoid of its usual, narrative-forming cultural signifiers, and therefore in a sense devoid of the experience of the site itself.

Tim Corballis’s writing has for some time been concerned with a number of strategies (ambiguity between fiction and historical fact, instability of the point of narration, etc) to efface texts’ apparent controlling subjectivities, in the form of their implied authors. These various attempts aim at a ‘voice from nowhere’, a voice not clearly spoken by a consistent narrator or author.

The current project juxtaposes work by these two artists. Alongside Amundsen’s photographs taken at Wynyard Point, Corballis’s texts are constructed as mock oral histories or cross-questionings relating to, and tangential to, the site: interviews with figures that pass through and perhaps stop for a while. A juxtaposition of text and image is never ‘pure’, in the sense of an equivalence between art forms or the appeal to a common language, equation or meta-discourse containing them. Rather, it is asymmetrical, and already infected with the familiar relationships between photo and text: caption (the priority of photo over text) and illustration (the priority of text over photo). In each of these relationships, the text transforms the photograph by adding to its minimal narrative – the viewer looks at the photo, reads the text, then looks back at the (now transformed) photo. As such, text is not simply ‘alongside’ photography, but intervenes in its narrative, in the minimal gap between the photograph and itself.

By placing the courtroom-style interrogation inside this minimal gap, a subjectivity is suggested: a way of looking that is a way of interrogating; a (recording and) controlling subjectivity. And yet everything in the photograph effaces the site and our understanding of it, while the text’s controlling voice is only minimally present and the narratives of its responses are tangential. As such we are left implicated in a kind of empty investigation, one which says more about the inquiring subjectivity than it does about the object under inquiry.

Wynyard Point is a site where a number of themes and frameworks (culture, nature, politics, economics, history, ethics etc) overlap and clash, but in a manner that is not clearly visible. As such, both subjectivity and narrative remain ambiguous here, difficult to pin down to a particular ‘way of looking’. It is therefore ideal as an object for an investigation into our modes of understanding, and one that relies on multiple fragmentary approaches, both in the difference between photo and text and in the multiple narratives of the written texts themselves.

The project’s title is a homophone of the basic act of juxtaposing photography and language: ‘see-say’. At the same time, its expression of contingency attunes us to the apparent conflict between fictional, created writing and factual, recorded photography, and the partial nature of the juxtaposed visions of reality. What is contingent – what might not be – is not the site itself, but the subjectivity perceiving it.

By Fiona Amundsen and Tim Corballis, 2007