AS PART OF THE AUCKLAND FESTIVAL OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Australian based Patrick Pound works with vast collections of found photographs filed in endless categories. There are thousands of single portraits. There are images of people in groups of two, three, four, five, and then crowds. There are photos of people with their names written on them. There are pictures of cars, and of pets, and of people with pets and cars. There are photographs of people holding a single thing ― a fish caught, a gift received or, something else ― something worthy of being photographed. There is a whole set of photographs of amateur models with the impressions of their socks, or their waistbands embedded on their skin. There are images which previous owners have marked to show where they are in the picture, or in which cabin they stayed, or just which bunch of flowers on a grave is theirs. There are, of course, also photographs of people holding cameras, and photos with their photographer’s thumb in them. There are numerous images which feature the shadow of their photographer. There is also a huge collection of people in the wind.

This exhibition features photographic Giclee prints of amusing and telling examples from several of these collections. ‘Portrait of the wind’ is a huge print of scores of images of vernacular snaps of people who are caught in the wind. ‘The photographer’s shadow’ is a vast collection of found photos each of which features its photographer’s shadow. Like so many of Pound’s works these are essentially photographs of things which we can’t (quite) see.