Caught In The Middle

Here is another set in my series, “A Walk in Ngaio”. The urge to preserve is strong: somehow I want to capture what Ngaio is like, what it looked like at some point in time. As I said in my previous post, I shun people in these photos, as if they are not so permanent as perhaps the landscape and the buildings are. Yet the structure of Ngaio is predominately shaped by people. You can see the people in the structures, as it were. You can see order and conformity a lot of the time, a hymn to both planning and community. Nairnville Park is like this: a triumph of engineering and landscape, yet it serves the local community so well. It is tune with the community. But that community values order and conformity. Ngaio is a middle-class suburb. A place to be caught in the middle of .

Here is the link in Picassa in case you missed it. http://picasaweb.google.com/paul.hellyer/AWalkInNgaioII#

Monday afternoon, Labour Day, October 2009, is warm and sunny. Instead of mowing the lawns, I go for a walk, camera in tow. My intent is simply: to record, to document what this ordinary suburb called Ngaio, looks like. It is a-creative. No attempt is made to create art, I am not a photographer, I take pictures with a camera. That is all. I just want to document, to preserve, not to create. The everyday fascinates me: a garage, a letterbox, or a tree. This images are everyday, unexceptional – anyone could have taken them. I am not of the picture, only with the camera.

There are too many photographs on the Internet. We are lost in a sea of digital images, all surprise and mystery is stripped away from places, people and things. We simply search on anything and we find an image of anything, anything, but really everything . All is known, the farthest corner of the earth is revealed to all. We sit at our computer, and see the world. I embrace this.

The photos, posted on my Picasa Web Album are simply a moment in time in Ngaio. They are devoid of people, I eschew cars as much as I can. The perfect picture is empty. It just is. Nonetheless I scrupulously “geo-tag” each photo, seeking out the precise location the photo was taken. I wish to be meter perfect, the exact spot is important. Google Maps and Google Earth will reveal all and given the high-resolution images available in both of Ngaio, I encourage you to check out the photos using these.

I enjoyed writing the captions more than I did taking the photos. The written word has more texture and turns upon itself in a way no photograph I could take, ever could.

Still, I guess this is my way of paying homage to Ngaio, the place where I live, have lived, off and on, for nearly twenty years.