Laurence aberhart biography

Biography.
One of Aotearoa New Zealand's most perceptive artists, Laurence Aberhart is a photographer who makes images of the vanishing past in an accelerating world.
Laurence Aberhart is widely regarded as one of New Zealand's most technically proficient photographers and a committed visual artist of the.

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Laurence Aberhart

Laurence Aberhart was born in Nelson, New Zealand in 1949 and has been exhibiting photographs since 1975.

Since the mid-1970s, Aberhart has taken his photographs using a century old Korona 8" by 10" view camera. He has become well known for his photographs recording Northland Maori church and marae architecture, exploring both Maori and Pakeha sacred and communal buildings. He has long been fascinated by Masonic Lodge buildings, a series which records these buildings from the far north to southern of New Zealand. Other architectural interiors he photographs are waiting rooms, rest areas, shops, community halls, barber’s shops and hair salons. Moving outside his 'Last Light' series focused on the sea and horizon in subtle emotive photographs with long exposures utilizing the last light of day.

In 2014 a 30year project photographing lone ‘digger’ memorials was formalised with the publication of ANZAC by Victoria University Press and the commencement of an accompanying touring exhibition.

Aberhart received a Fullbright Fellowship in 1987 and a QEII Arts Counci

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Laurence Aberhart

Photography and the post-European settlement history of New Zealand are linked. Aberhart is aware of the power of the medium: "there are some fantastic images that if New Zealanders as a whole saw, I know they'd take them into their hearts and their psyche and I know they would make us grow as a people and a country..." As Robert Frost said of poetry "It is a way of remembering that which it would impoverish us to forget." Aberhart works in a mode reflective of his photographic predecessors. "...what I've tried to do is take the sensibility and sensitivity and the aesthetic, that overall self-awareness of all that early photography, and try and do the same in New Zealand but incorporate some aspects of contemporary art practice into it."

Time is an essential ingredient. Aberhart is a photographer who is interested in the 'magic' or transcendent possibilities of photography and the affect this can have on our imaginations and aspirations. Geraldine Barlow writes "[he] chooses a process of stillness, an extended measure of moments over which light acts upon a pr

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b. 1949, Auckland
Lives in Northland, New Zealand

Laurence Aberhart is recognised as one of New Zealand’s most important protagonists of photography. His crisp and distinctive images have captured and highlighted important aspects of New Zealand cultural history since the 1970s.

Born in Nelson, Aberhart has been based in Russell, Northland since the early 1980s. He held his first solo exhibition at the Peter McLeavey Gallery, Wellington, in 1978. Since then, he has exhibited regularly in Wellington, Auckland, Sydney, Hong Kong, Los Angeles and various cities across Europe. A solo exhibition of his work was held at the Stedelijik Museum Amsterdam in 2002, alongside the much-lauded exhibition, Colin McCahon: A Question of Faith.

Aberhart has created numerous scenes of rural buildings and landscapes, along with a number of considered portraits. He has a distinctive way of working with the medium, capturing light and composing images in a crisp and immediately recognisable way. Curator Gregory O'Brien has stated, “Aberhart's images are bathed in the light of photograp