Ella Hickford is an Aotearoa New Zealand artist whose photographic practice reflects her passion for the environment and history. The immersive photographs presented in her upcoming exhibition Degeneration examine the effects of colonisation and early industry on the ecology of Horomaka Banks Peninsula. Ahead of her exhibition she spoke with City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston. Degeneration opens 5.30pm Tuesday 5 November and runs to 25 November 2024 at City Art Depot.
Giant Tōtara, Inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag on 3mm aluminium, 500x1400mm, 2024
Cameron Ralston: What is it that drew you to these places and to using landscape as your chosen imagery?
Ella Hickford: I’ve always photographed landscapes. I’ve only photographed a person once, and I’m not a people person, so it’s very rare that people will show up in my work, apart from tiny people in the distance. I am however very interested in the history of places and how people engage with their surroundings. Canterbury has quite a rich and complicated history in terms of colonisation and the modification of the environment that comes along with it.
How do the works talk about colonisation?
All the artworks are from my book Degeneration, which I produced for my recent Masters degree at the University of Canterbury. The book explores specific sites relevant to the history of Ōtautahi Christchurch through historic imagery, text and my own contemporary photographs. So, all these images are of specific sites that have something to do with the history of Banks Peninsula and Canterbury. Like the tree stumps at the top of Port Levy saddle are from the early sawmilling, and the image of Waihora Lake Ellesmere is taken from Timber Yard Road where they would float the logs across the lake to where one of the the mills was. Each site has a human influenced element to them. Sometimes it’s quite loose and then sometimes it’s quite clear.
Tōtara Stump Detail, Inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag on 3mm aluminium, Tryptych, 350x437mm (x3), 2024
Do you have an angle on that?
I’ve been raised with that leave it alone attitude (my father worked for DOC), with regards to the natural environment. I think that my angle has always been to just present the information to people and hope that they draw the right conclusions from it, rather than hugely pushing a personal agenda. I hope my work is seen as more documentary than highly political. Although in this current climate caring about the environment and readdressing the wrongs of colonisation could be considered quite political.
What’s your process like? Are you doing research beforehand? Or happening upon the sites?
It is probably a mix of both. I come across stuff and photograph it, then go research it because it has interested me in some way. For this project, there was a lot of research in museum archives looking at both past photographs and documents relating to the development of Canterbury. But I also hear of things through word of mouth, people who have lived in Christchurch much longer than me will suggest interesting locations that they know a bit about and if it seems like it’s up my alley. I’ll go check it out.
The West Coast where you were raised also has its own share of colonialist history, has that always sat uncomfortably for you?
Yeah, I’m Pākehā and I know most of my family history coming over to Aotearoa as well as Ngāi Tahu histories of the area that I’ve absorbed throughout my life. I always find navigating that a little bit difficult. I’m proud of my family history, but also I’m not proud of things that happened within the overarching time period. Historically, my family background on the West Coast has been heavily involved in the coal mining industry, which is very much the antithesis of what I value now.
Eroded Loess, Inkjet print on Canson Platine Fibre Rag on 3mm aluminium, 350x700mm, 2024
Do the works contain specific stories that you’re trying to tell within them?
I know the stories behind them such as where they are, why that site is important and the history behind it. I try to give nods to that when I’m doing titles or writing about works. For me, the story is quite a big part of it. In this selection of photographs the tōtara stumps were important for telling the early logging history and sawmill industry on Banks Peninsula. The loss of forest coverage allowed for the erosion of the loess, which is the fine, dusty yellow soil you see all around the peninsula, which in turn has impacted the waterways with sediments. The image of the algae is from the outlet canal that they’ve dug in Wairewa Lake Forsyth to try and mitigate all the effects of erosion, farming and fertiliser that’s gone into that lake. All these works are connected by that sort of timeline of events that started with colonisation and the arrival of Europeans to the area.
I think people around Canterbury are becoming more aware of the fact that the landscape here has been quite dramatically altered.
Coming from the West Coast, I can only think of one place where I wouldn’t swim because of pollution in my home town, which is downstream from the milk factory. But coming to Canterbury, there are all these beautiful waterways, but you can’t swim in them and you don’t really want to eat fish from them.
I got really interested in the water stuff when I was making work about the Waimakariri River. My uncle, who is a freshwater ecologist, made some offhand comment about the life cycle of the aquifers under the Canterbury Plains, and how what’s being put in now isn’t going to come out for another 40 odd years. That kind of kickstarted my interest in the environment around Canterbury, which has then spread into a lot of different areas.
How do you go about selecting and composing the exhibition from your years of looking at these ecological themes?
My photographic archive is pretty much organised into piles of categories or topographies. There’s a pile that relates to water, a pile that relates to trees, a pile that relates to farming and so on. When putting together exhibitions, it’s a process of going through those and thinking how they relate to each other and what they can say when combined with each other. A lot of my work boils down to looking at things and then finding the connections between them. I’m very interested in understanding how things work and how the relationship between different factors contributes to a wider whole.
What links the works in this show? Is it that idea of degeneration?
That title came from something written in the Canterbury Papers, which is the document the colonialists of the Canterbury Association used when founding Canterbury. In that they talk about the regeneration of the landscape. Obviously, they were talking about making the landscape more English and a reflection of their homeland. The opposite of regeneration is degeneration, and so the title came about thinking of my work showing the processes of that. In an effort to regenerate the landscape to fit English sensibilities, it has led to a sort of natural degeneration of what it once was. You cut down the trees and the soil erodes, the eroded soil goes into the lakes, and then the lakes are buggered. There is a flow on effect of changing the landscape.
What draws you to using the panoramic format? Is there a link to the historic use of photography in Canterbury?
I was looking at a lot of photographs by Doctor Alfred Charles Barker and Robert Percy Moore in my research, who were photographers working in Canterbury and Aotearoa covering the colonial period and the first half of the twentieth century respectively. A lot of those images are in a panoramic format surveying the landscape. So from a historical perspective, I like kind of following that tradition and how it relates to colonial perspectives, and also that it’s a big wide view, which is more human I think. People don’t see things in ratioed chunks that more typical photo sizes offer – we have 180 degree vision – and then with the curved panels they become quite immersive.
Tōtara Stumps, High performance matte vinyl on curved 3mm aluminium, 425x1400x400mm, 2024
Yeah, they suck you in.
I’ve always liked that. With a lot of my other work when I was thinking immersive I was playing with scale, printing images as large as possible so it felt like the viewer was really in the image. Which works, but also doesn’t provide the same kind of immersive experience as the curved panels do as they wrap around you as you get closer to them. The flat panels create more of a window that I really like too, with no frame or glass to get between you and the artwork.
The way you frame them as long narrow landscapes creates a slightly claustrophobic feel. There’s a tension in there. What consideration do you give to the framing of the images?
I’ve been told that my photos can be a little anxiety inducing. My early panoramas were all composed of separate images that layered on top of each other, which is how they used to do old panoramas back before Photoshop was a thing. For some reason people found that presentation quite tense and chaotic, which I really liked but I think it also distanced the work from the viewer in a way. It was more about the presentation itself creating that feeling which might have let the image do a little less work. With these works, I think it’s primarily the subject matter combined with the framing – the panoramas feel like they could go further but you’re kind of trapped within the edges of the image.
When I was creating the work I was thinking about jumping from really wide overall views and then into those quite close up, tight views that don’t have any hint of a skyline. I think that forcing of a quite dramatic change in perspective helps create those feelings of anxiety too. A lot of other photographers whose work I’m drawn to use what I’d call a clean image.
As opposed to a distorted image?
I think it’s the structure of them, really tidy and considered framing that almost feels alien because it’s almost a little too perfect. Maybe it comes from my background in painting. I painted a lot of landscapes when I was younger and in that I think you really have to consider image structure and legibility. The rule of thirds and the golden spiral, those really basic composition techniques you get taught early on to make visually interesting images.
Is the panorama done in camera?
No, I’m stitching them together in either Lightroom or Photoshop depending on the image. People find it interesting that I don’t use a tripod when I work, but I really just hate carrying them around. I think most people who do panoramas consider the tripod to be a very important part of the process of capturing technically great images. I’ve got a Fuji GFX which is quite a meaty camera and heavy on its own, and I usually am walking quite a distance to get to where I want to shoot, so I take them all standing in place and pivoting. It’s very much from my point of view and everything’s shot from my head height.
Is venturing out to take these photographs quite a solitary process for you?
Yeah, it’s a 100%solitary process. It’s easier to concentrate. I find if I have other people there, I try to take photos more quickly and end up rushing. For me photography is almost meditative, taking the time to slow down and really think about what I am looking at, so having others around almost ruins the experience for me. A lot of these photos also required quite a bit of walking, which is not always something that people are up for.
We’ve actually got a new puppy in our house and my process is very similar to the dog’s process of running around and focussing on different things until I find the one thing that I’m truly interested in. Except her process is ‘toy, toy, different toy’, whereas mine is a mix of a lot of test shots and research about a particular site, just to find that one location where I think the composition, subject matter and relevant history of the location all combine to create the photo that I want to take.
Shooting digitally you can take a great number of photos. Is there a lot of selection after the fact?
I think for the entirety of the project and book I took over 5000 photos. So, there’s quite the narrowing down process. But I’ve always been like that, when I first started photography at the School of Fine Arts, Glenn Busch taught me to not delete anything and I think I’ve taken that to heart, maybe a bit too much in some regards.
Often, I’ll start with an image that I think is the one that I want, then when I start putting it together in a show or a sequence I’ll find another photo that I took works better. Sometimes no images will say exactly what I want them to and I’ll have to go out and re-shoot the site if it’s a place that I’ve decided is really necessary to what I’m focussing on.
Stock Fence in Te Waihora Lake Ellesmere, High performance matte vinyl on curved 3mm aluminium, 425x1400x400mm, 2024
What makes a successful image for you? When you’re scrolling through your 5000 photos what’s the standout thing that puts one over the others?
The easiest way to answer that would be to say ‘vibes.’ A very gen Z thing to say. I guess I’m looking for what the image is conveying and how it’s conveying it. Ones that I don’t choose are possibly not as strong at saying what I want them to. For example, the photograph of Waihora Lake Ellesmere, I have other images that don’t have the stock fence going into it. Removing that it just looks like a really nice view of a lake, which I feel doesn’t speak as much to what I want it to speak about. There’s always a risk when photographing more scenic locations of falling into the trap of taking a tourist shot, something that looks great but doesn’t speak to anything else. On the other end of the spectrum, there’s also the problem of creating an image that speaks to too many things and gets a bit confusing.
I tried to do quite a bit of photographing the remaining historic buildings in town. It’s very easy for something to become about something else when you’re in town. There might be a Ukrainian flag that’s prominent or a huge advertising billboard and suddenly the work takes on a whole new context that doesn’t push what you want it to. It’s very much a process of narrowing down. Looking for the one that says what I want it to say and maybe something extra that provides contemporary context, but not so much extra that the image loses the message.
How people spend time with a photograph is often different to how they might spend time with a painting or sculpture. Is that something that you have come across with your work?
I think the difficulty with photographs – apart from people not understanding the skill behind photography because the human hand behind it is so much less obvious than in painting or sculpture – is that a lot of people take them at face value. A lot of the photographs you see across your everyday life, aren’t about photography, they’re about conveying information as advertisements or general media. Which I think is both the best thing about photography and one of the worst things. It’s an incredibly accessible medium because everyone has a phone with a camera in their pockets nowadays, but people also take photographs at face value because our daily lives are so saturated with them. It’s very easy to scroll past someone’s holiday photos on Instagram without too much thought other than ‘oh, that’s pretty’.’ That can be conflicting when doing landscapes, especially in Aotearoa. There is this pull to make it look nice, which is so incredibly easy to do, but then also not create something that’s just about the aesthetic value of the landscape.
There is a balancing between the medium and the message when making an artwork. You’re right that there is a kind of baggage that comes with the medium of photography.
I think the most powerful thing with photography is that ability to capture a snapshot of time, it’s literally a frozen moment that you experienced, which is great when you’re going through archives and projects and you can see people’s perspectives, their lives and experiences, and what was really important to them. People almost always photograph things that are important and things they want to remember, their kids growing up, or the holiday of a lifetime, which is really lovely. The difficulty is getting people to engage with it in a slightly different way than they engage with 99% of the photography that they come across on a day-to-day basis.
There is an importance that you can put on things through how you present them, such as putting works in a gallery and on a curved panel. It changes the reading quite drastically.
Yes, photography is a lot about choices. It’s a choice of where to point the camera, what time to do it, what to edit. And then choices with printing, framing or sticking them on Instagram. I’m not huge on editing. I want my images to look as natural as possible so they convey a sense of truth, or rather what the world looked like to me in that very moment. I think the greatest achievement in photography is to create images that people look back on and think, ‘oh so that’s what it was like then’.
