Galway Street (facing East), Auckland, 17.09.2006, 6.33 (Wet Paving Stones)

Galway Street (facing North), Auckland, 25.09.2006, 6.45 (Golden Window)

Waitemata Plaza, Auckland, 24.09.2006, 6.40 (Flare)

Browns Bay, Auckland, 28.05.2006, 7.21 (Ocean View)

Lynn Mall City, Auckland, 26.03.2006, 6.25 (Three Shadows)

Browns Bay, Auckland, 03.06.2006, 7.30 (Framed Sunlight)

Pt. Chevalier, Auckland, 03.04.2004, 6.53

Pt. Chevalier, Auckland, 12.04.2004, 7.05

City Walk, Canberra, 28.06.2004, 7.25

Federal Street, Auckland, 27.03.2003, 6.35

Garden Place
2004 - 2006

'Stranger Than Kindness: New works from Garden Place by Fiona Amundsen'

In the urban environment it is almost impossible to stand still for photographer and pedestrian alike. Far easier to be drawn into the chaos, to pick out points that might become landmarks lighting a path through the haze. Easier to fill the space and make it cohere through the addition of normalised personalities, stories and drama. We do this physically every day. It's no surprise that most photographs do the same.

In Fiona Amundsen's Garden Place photographs, though, civic sites are deprived of people and seem therefore to be stripped of meaning. Furthermore, until now her images have borne little taint of artistic expressiveness. Thus drained of life the works have offered a rare unclouded glimpse of the abstract forms and forces moulding all human life. Squares and plazas, forecourts and promenades have stared at us blankly, reflecting the objective, impartial stare of the camera itself, and left us wondering what kind of life could ever warm such spaces. This aesthetic indifference has been a powerful tonic for anyone seduced by the particularising narratives of documentary photography. And Amundsen's photographic nihilism has demanded an equally cool gaze from its viewers.

From her early series – Pedestrian, Wooden, Time Trials – through to the recent and ongoing Garden Place, Amundsen's photographs have circled the same questions. How can we view the world when the very act of looking limits what we see? How can we desire, as photography does, without destroying the object of our desire? Her first answer was to pare photography back to an activity of blank surveillance. Nothing left to desire or destroy through misreadings, biases and fears. Nothing, that is, but the object-less yearning of the viewer faced with such emptiness. Thus Amundsen's works – until now – materialised a world strangely freed from our grasp.

Now, however, Amundsen seems to have found a new answer to her questions. She has drunk her own tonic and with her new works she's offering a sweetener. By her exacting standards these works are sloppy – decidedly expressive elements have slipped through her net. The frames are crowded and chaotic. They approach their subjects from odd, skewiff angles. They contain diagonals, pockets of movement, blurs caused by the breeze in the trees. After the old steely blues these colours verge on saturation. Boldest of all, flared light, reflections and even shadows encroach on the impassive surfaces.

Of course these are very tiny births. Amundsen has not relinquished control over her medium. She isn't photographing people, and her work is still scientifically precise. These openings in the membrane of her practice are small and restrained, they hardly amount to a collapse. But only such control could withstand the emergence of seductive fragments without regressing to old ways of looking. Only against a resolutely neutral ground could the minutest outbursts – the intersection of pole and cloud, the flutter of a flag – strike one so joyously.

And suddenly, desire is on the move. Having arrived at Amundsen's inhuman clearing we now sample tiny gifts of warmth, we witness with rare clarity expressive forms unshackled from social context or narrative convention. Our new eyes are put to the test. What should we make of these kindnesses? Of the bright shining sunrise reflected in a brick window-frame, of the steaming puddles beneath a fountain, of the moral imperatives – listen, heed, understand, accept – on the hoardings? This is material with a rich history of aesthetic association, but in Amundsen's hands it appears liberated from history. In her de-publicised, de-socialised spaces flares and blurs don't read as specific emotional outpourings, and they don't add up to a story. They might seem distilled from people and history and things, but they are given to us as percepts by themselves. A zig. A zag. A golden glow. Random components, ingredients for meaning. What this means is that the possibilities remain unlimited – none of the world has been destroyed by this looking. These offerings are not concessions to an established mode of seeing. Instead, they are signs of life. Because with percepts, of course, come new affects. Feelings are stirred.

Having torn down the foundations, piece by piece Amundsen is now rebuilding photography's use value. Maybe it can give us a habitable space after all. The flares and reflections of light, the swerves and collisions of lines work like glue: using them we can piece together something with ourselves in it. Small corners of the images call out to us. We project ourselves, our fantasies and desires, into them, and discover a newfound pleasure in our longing. Little affects put us in the picture.

Once we've seen Amundsen's strange sites afresh – as generous sites of plenitude and potential – perhaps we can occupy physical space afresh. Whatever productive feelings we find in these uncanny environs will be carried forward with us into the equally artificial city. And as we go, with a bit of luck, we'll remember a few of the infinite ways of being in urban space.

By Cassandra Barnett, 2006