Looking Back on the City, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 01/11/2008, 6.40 (blue and orange)

Subritzky Inward Goods and Freight Wharf (looking North), Wynyard Point, Auckland, 06/06/2009, 7.39 (soft blue)

Looking towards Princes Wharf, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 21/03/2009, 7.33 (green and red glow)

Looking towards Princes Wharf, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 01/11/2008, 6.23 (burning sun)

Looking towards Halsey Street Extension, Western Viaductt, Auckland, 09/11/2009, 6.33 (empty truck)

Looking towards Subritzky Inward Goods and Freight Wharf Under Construction, Wynyard Point, Auckland, 29/03/2009, 7.38 (two rounds)

Hamer Street (looking South East), Wynyard Point, Auckland, 04/10/2008, 7.05 (one light)

Wynyard Point
2007-2010

'A Rough Guide to a Lonely PLanet: Postcards from Photographers'¹

[A] typological method is echoed in Fiona Amundsen's photographs. Her images of the 'Tank Farm' on Auckland's downtown waterfront are from a larger series that concentrates on this former industrial site in a state of decay. "My interest has to do with the relationships bewteen public 'built' spaces and their histories, and how all this is rendered (or not) through photographs." Amundsen's photographs of urban spaces acknowledge that landscape is implicitly loaded with cultural-historical narratives: "I'm meaning the invisible structures that make up a city, the things that we know are there but can't necessarily see in a photograph - things like politics, economics, the social and cultural profiles of a city, its history; all of which influence how a city ends up looking." The decomissioned Tank Farm becomes a postcard for a kind of anti-travel writing, one that taints the natural, clean, green and picturesque images with which New Zealand is usually promoted in tourist and cinematic imagery.

By Hanna Scott, 2010

Notes

This excerpt of text is from Sightseeing (2010), an exhibition and book project curated/edited by Hanna Scott.