The Mexican poet Octavio Paz wrote, “In a picture things are, they do not happen.”1 With this statement, Paz defines images as static representations of reality. He is referring to the way a painting is unable to reveal the action of its making, or the unfolding of time outside of its frame. Paz continues, “painting confronts us with definitive, unchanging, motionless realities.”2 Photography – a medium both mechanical and alchemical – complicates this distinction. It is often described in terms that focus on its ability to visually capture a sense of the constant movement of time, image and sensation within which we exist. As silver meets light, as pixels coalesce onscreen, the photographic image emerges as a complex compound of fixity and flux. Portraiture, in particular, inhabits this paradox. A portrait holds still what is in motion – a face, a gesture, an expression – transforming ephemerality into permanence. Yet the subject is never entirely still. A gaze lingers, a body shifts, feeling stirs beneath the surface.

This exhibition presents the work of Adrienne Martyn and Sam Norton, two artists of different generations who draw on the conventions of photography to both order and destabilise the representation of subjective experience. Through their lens, the portrait becomes a site of negotiation, of enclosure as well as resistance. Exploring the tension between what is immutable and what extends beyond the frame, their works sit at the boundary of the camera’s momentary precision and the continuous flow of lived experience.

A practicing photographer for over fifty years, Adrienne Martyn began her career working in social documentary as part of the Sydney Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s, producing photographs for feminist periodicals including Broadsheet, me Jane and refractory girl, among others. She became a member of the Sydney Women’s Film Group in 1972, contributing to collectively authored films that chronicled the polemic of women’s experience. Created in Ōtautahi Christchurch in the year that British theorist Laura Mulvey published her formative dissection of visual pleasure in cinema and its deference to the male gaze, Martyn’s film The object (1975) critically articulates the ways in which, as Mulvey argued, “Woman's desire is subjected to her image [...] as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”3

Martyn’s still portraits, of which those on view are a selection from the early to mid-1980s, continue this inquiry into the politics of image-making: Who controls the image? Who determines how a subject is seen? Taken in close collaboration with her subjects, Martyn’s portraits are posed and poised – these are highly self-conscious acts of representation. Often on the cusp of youth or early adulthood, the figures in these images play themselves with both candour and camp. Seen alongside are two works from a more recent series documenting that most transitive of spaces, the shopping mall. The eerie afterglow of consumption and desire permeates these scenes of the now-defunct H&J Smith department store in Invercargill, a landscape at once familiar and estranged. In this exhibition, Martyn’s photographs are displayed behind sheets of clear acrylic, a theatrical device intended to seduce and repel in equal measure.

The elusive gazes in Sam Norton’s series As long as someone’s watching (2023–ongoing) do not meet our eye. Initially taken as an intimate form of memory device, these large-scale, high-gloss images are drawn from the artist’s personal archive of screenshots of Skype calls with her friends and family. Treading a fine line between public and private, Norton’s photographs are, in the words of French writer Hervé Guibert, “not innocent.”4 As images, they push and pull at the limits of legibility; at a distance, they resemble cinematic tableaux, but up close, they dissolve into a haze of pixels, lush textures and refracted blue light. Taken through a computer screen and recording a now-obsolete form of technology, As long as someone’s watching stages the shifting nature of communication in an era of surveillance, digital mediation and self-performance. In this body of work, Norton tests the contemporary interaction of spectatorship and validation, asking, are we only real when we’re observed? Does our existence depend on the gaze of another, or the way we see ourselves reflected back through screens?

Read together, the works in Things are, they do not happen position portraiture as a kind of threshold – where subjects neither fully are nor fully happen, but instead exist in a suspended state, vibrating between being and becoming.

Notes

1 Octavio Paz quoted in Jean Leymarie, Balthus, Macmillan, London, 1982, p. 56.
2 Ibid.
3 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen, 16, no. 3, Autumn 1975, p. 7.
4 Hervé Guibert, Ghost image, trans. Robert Bononno, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, p. 146.

Te Pātaka Toi Adam Art Gallery gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ronald Woolf Memorial Trust in the realisation of this exhibition.