Huntly Speedway, Huntly, 09.11.2001, 6.35

Kihikihi Speedway, Kihikihi, 22.06.2001, 6.30

Mere Mere Vintage Speedway, Mere Mere, 03.08.2001, 6.10

Paradise Valley Speedway, Rotorua, 19.11.2001, 6.30

Taranaki International Speedway, Stratford, 11.09.2001, 6.00

Waikaraka Park, Auckland, 16.09.2001, 12.30

Western Springs Speedway, Auckland, 12.07.2001, 1.00

Time Trials
2001

Fiona Amundsen spent a good part of last year photographing amateur speedway tracks around New Zealand. Her new series Time Trials is the result. In a presentation she gave at Hamilton's RAMP Gallery, Amundsen stated that: 'These images complicate inscribed loadings of photography through falsifying heterogeneous codes of authenticity, which lend the photographic image its undeniable veracity.' This is probably a reasonable (though pretty wordy) summary of the project. But maybe a simpler description is 'anxious'. In fact, most aspects of the series seem 'unsure', in a very controlled and measured kind of way. Time Trials is included in Zara Stanhope's Slow Release: Recent Photography in New Zealand at Melbourne's Heide Museum of Modern Art, a show of New Zealand photographers who provide the 'appearance of objectivity in their images'. On the surface, Amundsen's photos seem to fit with this premise. But Time Trials is far from being a simple 'study' of a specific kiwi pastime. Instead, it's an awkward examination of Amundsen's own practice as a photographer.

Amundsen tends to focus on urban subjects, giving them a sense of incompleteness, showing us a kind of urban malaise through the partial presence of signifiers of class. For instance, her three previous series have all looked at signs of urban life - tenement housing (Dwelling), motorways (Modern) and city parks (Pedestrian). Their incompleteness is really what makes her images anxious, but the anxiety isn't claustrophobic, which might be expected given that her 'subjects' are usually the products of large numbers of people compressed into small areas. This is because the sites Amundsen chooses are designed for claustrophobic use. They depend on people, and lots of them. Instead, her anxiety is agoraphobic because she tries to remove all human presence - holding breath because of a disturbingly open stillness rather than hyperventilating from a bombardment of activity.

This points to one of Amundsen's most distinctive traits - her near-total aversion to people. In her work, she doesn't just reduce their presence - she obsessively eradicates them. But then a trace is always there, because all her subjects are designed and built for human use, so she can't ever fully get away from them. Her need to get rid of people is even weirder given that she's got a degree in anthropology, which historically, as a discipline, is based entirely on the study of people, and photography's a big part of this. One of the features of anthropological and documentary photography (like Magnum) that Amundsen criticises is the way it creates a kind of Us/Them relationship, a binary between viewers and viewed that leaves the subject powerless. So on the surface, a similar accusation could be made at Time Trials, because the whole series could be read as a piss-take of petrolhead pastimes. But if Amundsen wanted to do that, she would've included 'real' petrolheads, fishtailing their way around oil-slicked paddocks, using the speedways.

So in Time Trials, there are no people and none of the speedways are complete. All of them are cropped, taken from a viewpoint that's a sort of awkward-midway space, like Amundsen can't decide where to stand when she's taking the photo. But then, it's the same in every image, so she seems to know exactly where she wants to stand. Either it's bad pictorialism or very good irony, a parody of New Zealand landscape photography's sense of completion and quiet 'timelessness' (providing another layer to the series' title). This incompleteness makes viewers anxious, unsure about what's happening on the periphery of each speedway. But due to the way they're exhibited, Amundsen doesn't even let us construct this part for ourselves. Just as each edge is being contemplated and mentally filled in, the next one's on you, hung close enough so that you have to start thinking about a new track before you've finished with the last one.

Ultimately then, the way the images are made is much more important than what's being photographed. They're taken with a sort of obsessive-compulsive behaviour that feeds their anxiousness, all shot at the same time of day, in the same weather conditions, same light temperature, with the same camera, the same horizon line, the same film, in fact, the same batch of film. Then they're printed on the same machine, the same paper. In the past, she's even gone to the extent of trying to print her photographs at the same time of day, as though this would actually make a difference to the outcome. The titles are just as obsessive - records of time and place that all have identical formats, not just to the other speedways but also to her two earlier series Modern and Pedestrian. Amundsen says that this control makes the images seem more redundant and banal, but I'm not convinced. I think the strictness of her technique gives the photos a kind of hand-wringing nerdiness that makes them even more nervous and unstable.

While the exhibited prints are fairly big, the book version of Time Trials (which, incidentally, was always the intended format for the series) is small. As Amundsen points out, it's almost 'stupid-small' because she's used a large format camera, which gives the images masses of detail. So when you open the book, you encounter tiny versions of the speedways bled to the edge of each page, perfect colour matches of the larger prints, but they feel cramped, jammed in. Several blank pages are also included, a pacing device (interesting given that the subject is speed) that breaks the repetition of the tracks and references the way the larger prints are displayed with white spaces of wall between them. The cover is '18% grey', a standard starting point that will be instantly recognisable to most photographers. In a sense, the book is a pocket-sized exhibition that gives the images an intimacy and containability very different to the experience of the prints.

The fact that it's obsessive, awkward, and deeply, deeply nerdy gives Time Trials a complex and depressing beauty. And, after having thought about it, the way Amundsen spoke about the work at RAMP Gallery must have been ironic, her obsessive vocabulary yet another way of subjecting the speedways to almost unnecessary control. It's this consistency of control that makes Time Trials so sophisticated and testing.

By Anthony Byrt, 2002