Interior, hair salon, Opunake, Taranaki, 1 June 2010

Interior, hair salon, Opunake, Taranaki, 1 June 2010

Interior, hair salon, Opunake, Taranaki, 1 June 2010 seems to sit oddly within Laurence Aberhart’s series of thirty photographs of Taranaki, although not at all in the artist’s oeuvre. If a single photograph were needed to embody ideas of truth and beauty, this is the one up for the rosette. The photographer has recorded without discrimination but with great tenderness every detail of this small-town temple to the cult of beauty. His artfulness is to make of this simple interior, skating as it does on the thin ice of shabby, a hymn to hope.

Aberhart’s photographs may not ‘do’ beauty as commonly understood, but they don’t necessarily do ‘truth’ either. At least, not in such a bald, absolute way. Pontius Pilate’s question ‘What is truth?’ may have been a cynical strategy to avoid an incriminating decision, but in a broader sense it’s still a query well worth posing. In the years since its invention photography has borne the burden of perhaps too much truth—maybe more from community desire than from its own innate capacities. Truth is a coldly abstract concept anyway: we’re more comfortable with familiar notions of ‘true’ and ‘real’ putting our faith in facts not abstractions.

Which is what these photographs do. Most of them aim for visual accuracy, strive for a degree of reliability as reportage. But facts by themselves are, literally, meaningless. What invests them with meaning is our engagement with the images, bringing to the exchange a wealth of personal experience that sets fire to the factual kindling. Aberhart’s art is presenting the facts unfussily, in such a dead-pan way there’s no sense of being collared or hectored. Then, before awareness dawns, we have ignition. Memory’s let loose, and the rest is history.

— Excerpt, Peter Ireland, ‘Unspecial Effects: Laurence Aberhart’s Taranaki,’ Laurence Aberhart: Recent Taranaki Photographs, 2012. Adapted for Collection Online, 2023.