Patrick Reynolds is a photographer known primarily for his black and white images of New Zealand landscape. Although black and white photography is often associated with a documentary style and a “truthful” evocation of place it would be a mistake to assume that correlation with Reynolds’s work. These are artful, playful, carefully constructed images. Reynolds wishes to question the traditions of landscape photography and always seeks to challenge conventional ways of seeing. His recent work in POWER has juxtaposed nature with the muscularity and strength of the modernist constructions that are modernist power stations.

Solaris 17.December 2005 - 5.February 2006

Power Photography

Exhibition notes
Malcolm Walker
18 October 2002

I first saw these photographs as proofs, casually scattered across a dining room table. It was an accidental viewing but their directness held me. There was a clarity of observation and a matter of factness of presentation that just sat right. Such a great subject. Power, the Waikato. Huge: culturally, environmentally, historically, economically and physically huge. The images, perfectly judged, stayed with me. There is plenty here.

Hydro and geothermal electricity. These are ours. The Waikato schemes were an era of certain national heroism and purpose as enduring as it has been audacious. We were proud of those schemes. As a sixties South Island schoolboy in Hokitika, I diligently swotted the dams of the Waikato (in order, go on, ask me.... ) for School Cert geography. So important. And here they are, from the delicacy of a mountain stream to the loaded brooding of the lakes. No sad results of Think Big here, just the State getting on with it. Each project taking six or seven years in construction, stretching manpower and design resources and sprouting fresh towns and camps in their scrubby, stripped environs. Eight colossal schemes built between 1940 and 1964 alone. An endowment of lakes flooding recent history, forests, farms, roads and favourite places. No room for nostalgia or sentiment in this place. This is tough business.

Taking on nature on its own terms is not for the faint hearted. I wonder where the Resource Management Act would have left these ventures, once part of a raw, scarred landscape, now in massive, comfortable repose with their tranquil waters looped to another world with wire tracery and flanked with forgiving general greenery, splashed with punga. Only the churned water at the base of those heroic architectural boxes that are the powerhouses gives any hint of the savage extraction of energy taking place within.

These things do not blend in with the landscape, as seems to be the misguided call in these tentative times: they are the landscape. As appropriate and seemingly timeless as the pyramids but, hell, aren’t they practical?

There is something of our psyche in these things, this process: a competitiveness, a solidity, a dependableness, a shoulder to the land. Front row, propping square on, and truly anchored. Mind you, anchoring did not come easy on these actively faulting volcanic lands. Innovation and determination lie deep.

Ref: People,Politics and Power Stations. John E Martin
ed. Electricity Corporation of NZ and Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, 1998.

Patrick Reynolds

50. Maraetai II [tailrace]

Price: $3400
Media: 2001 Inkjet on Watercolour Paper
Edition: 2/8                                                   
Dimension: 850 x 850 mm

Patrick Reynolds

51. Maraetai II [penstocks]

Price: $3400
Media: 2001 Inkjet on Watercolour Paper
Edition: 2/8                                                   
Dimension: 850 x 850 mm

Patrick Reynolds

52. Maraetai II [insulators]

Price: $3400
Media: 2001 Inkjet on Watercolour Paper
Edition: 2/8                                                   
Dimension: 850 x 850 mm