In Ōtautahi Christchurch-based artist Jamie Price’s first exhibition with City Art Depot, Self, he explores personal connections and histories related to the landscapes of the West Coast/Te Tai Poutini. Ahead of his exhibition he spoke with City Art Reader editor Cameron Ralston.
Self runs 10 February – 9 March 2026 at City Art Depot. Jamie Price will also give an artist talk in the gallery at 1pm on Thursday the 19th of February, all welcome.
Cameron Ralston: What’s the significance of the places you’ve chosen to photograph and present in this exhibition?
Jamie Price: In my undergrad and prior to that, I’ve always been very drawn to landscape photography specifically and abandoned spaces or sort of liminal spaces. Spaces in transition and areas that are a bit forgotten or in transit. A lot of my process is quite instinctual. I tend to go into a space and respond to it. This body of work has come about as an investigation into why I do that, and that, long story short, came about as looking at how I view the world and how that translates into my photography. That has then tied into stuff that’s happened to my family, which has led to significant places to do with my family. In the context of the show, I’m looking at the West Coast and specifically areas to do with my granddad. Also, his relationship with my mum – he died when Mum was about 12, so I never met him. The body of work is kind of a cross-examination of trauma in space and trauma in community, that being my family. I know that’s a lot to unpack.
Is there family trauma which you’re working with?
It’s trauma in the sense of the death of my grandfather and how that played into how my mum and her sister’s lives panned out. I guess that’s more personal, the undercurrents of the work. I’m looking at parallels with him, a blue-collar bloke and self-made man who came from the mines and built up this big company and all this stuff. Looking at the wider attitudes of that time in 20th century New Zealand of the colonial dream. I have a postcard my grandad received from Norman Kirk, the Prime Minister at the time. It contains a poem talking about how we have tamed this wild space and made the land our own. How that mentality has informed how these spaces have changed, and also informed how my family has changed, is the wider gist of the project. So yeah, they’re significant places to my grandfather specifically, but they’ve also have been chosen or selected to be spaces that represent this mentality of taming or changing space, and how that’s sort of becoming, to some people at least, a dated concept.
‘Taming nature’ as such has had some pretty serious consequences. Especially given the impact on communities from increasing extreme weather events. Perhaps there is a growing understanding around how we live with the land.
Absolutely. The project started off more focused on the political contentions around mining spaces, and then became a lot more personal as the project developed throughout the year.
I’m looking at the mist, I can’t see, medium format film scan, fine art inkjet print, 1000x600mm
Is that context of your family and the historic connection that you have personally to these spaces vital to the work?
I think it’s vital in the sense that it became quite a powerful tool to connect with a part of my family’s history and where I’ve come from that I didn’t really pay attention to otherwise. I had a lot of big conversations with my mum. This work I’m looking at the mist, I can’t see came about from a car ride out to the old family farm, I’ve got transcribed conversations I had with her during that.
I don’t think the work is about colonial guilt either. That’s there, but I’m not really trying to portray an overtly negative or positive thing. I’m interested in how my family history impacted and changed space and how am I entangled within that for better or for worse.
Does being in those landscapes evoke any sort of feeling for you?
I’m definitely drawn to these spaces. I almost exclusively photograph when it’s very wet and cloudy, which is logistically painful, but leans towards a tone of melancholy and reflection. The photographs tend to be a response to those feelings. I’ll usually go out hiking alone for a day and probably only take four or five photos. So it tends to be, if I’m getting my camera out and going through the effort of it, there’s usually a significance to how I’m feeling at the time.
How are you shooting the photos?
Ninety percent of the time I’m shooting on a large format camera. It’s all analog for a variety of reasons. Mainly I like shooting in black and white. I’m colour blind as well, that’s another random note why I don’t shoot colour. I like looking at the textures of things. It’s a very slow process, it takes probably 15, 20 minutes to set up and take a photo, which I think lends to that mentality of it being significant. I find that having that limitation of a slow and thought-out process lends quite well to the way I’m thinking and trying to engage with space, to really sit with these places and begin to understand them. I’m trying to build an aspect of reciprocity with the area and not just rock up, take my photo and leave.
Do you develop your own film?
I photograph it, develop it, print it myself, do the whole thing. This is all done at Ilam School of Fine Arts at the moment. So, these are inkjet prints, but I do dark room printing as well. I’m always hand processing. I guess it’s quite common with photographers, but there’s a preciousness to the work and a personal aspect to it. Like it feels wrong having other people handle the work. It’s also just financially more viable if you do it yourself.
What draws you to photography as a medium to explore your ideas and history?
I wasn’t an artistic kid, I got into photography in my early 20s. That came about as kind of like an urban exploration thing, trespassing into abandoned earthquake-damaged properties. I was drawn to document those spaces that had changed, were lost or in transition, that had a liminality to them. Self-reflection and trying to understand why I do that has been a big part of this body of work. I guess the underlying theme for the last year is why do I take photos? I think I look at space and buildings as a way to engage with the world and history, which is why I tend to like these transitional places. The way I relate to my grandad has always been through buildings he built. Looking at space and structure has become a way for me to engage, not just with the world, but with my own family and connections as well. Looking at these places I can learn about stuff that’s been lost to me as well. So, I think that’s why.
the apple of my eye (detail), large format 4×5 film scans, fine art inkjet print, triptych, each frame: 1000x800mm
Photography often serves a documentary function. Art photography can too of course, but these works individually, without any of that context, are still quite beautiful images. There’s an aesthetic to the works in the quality of the light and the depth of black and the focus.
I aim for an ambiguity. To an extent I like to try to remove elements that ground time and place within them. Photography is an interesting tool because on the surface it’s perceived quite literally. As a society we look at a photo and see it as a one-to-one representation of a place or space. That can become quite an interesting convention to play with as well. A lot of these images are taken with quite long exposures, like the three photographs in the triptych. Each one of those shots was about 15 to 30 seconds per photo. Between the frames you can see transitions, clouds moving, and a sort of still milkiness to the water. So, it’s not a true representation of what the space is. What I’m trying to achieve with it is this feeling of it being its own realm, separated from the real world. It plays into those ideas of memory and time – temporal ambiguity.
The craft of what you do certainly goes into the mystery of the work. Because your works aren’t just one-to-one representations – through layering of processes and context – there does end up being more to engage with.
Yeah, it’s a very involved process. Even in this shot I was so close to him there’s a wee bit of blur in the swing sets, which I love because everything else is so sharp and in focus. Subtractive process is talked about a lot in art photography, where when you’re taking a photo you’re actively excluding things outside of the frame. When I compose something, especially when I’m working with this really slow process, I’m making constant little tweaks to exactly how the frame is. Because when I’m spending 20 minutes to take this photo and spending another hour in a dark room developing it, I want it to be perfect. When you start to think about what you’re excluding it’s sort of the opposite way of working to I guess how I would do a painting where you’re adding to layers and building on something. That can be used as an abstract tool or a literal tool as well.
Do these works fit into your Masters of Fine Arts studies?
Yeah, absolutely. I just got access to the old family farm that my granddad built, and the Masters is centered around that. It’s about 600 hectares of land on the West Coast, and it’s not in the family anymore. He sold it like a month before he died. It was full native bush, and he bought it because there was a gold claim out the back. He bulldozed in his own roads, built his own house, built his own paddocks. The whole place is him. Chronologically, this was the last frame I took of the year self which I took on that piece of land. Right at the end of last year I got in contact with the current owners and they’re quite happy for me to go and just camp out there. So, I think the Masters will involve a couple of very long trips out into the back of their farm. It’s just all native bush and old gold mines. I want to deeply investigate a super localised area. So this body of work is a preliminary sort of research into the area, the space and the thought process behind the work.
self (detail), medium format film scan, fine art inkjet print, 1400x1000mm
One of the early titles for the triptych is Scars on flesh, how do you view that in relation the landscapes?
Scarring is quite an intense word, but when you think about it in space and how colonial New Zealand interacted with the land, there is a lot of scarring. In the triptych I played with what I would consider a conventionally aesthetically pleasing photograph of what I see as a space that has been ripped apart. There’s a fun play in portraying it as a very natural and beautiful space, where actually we’ve ripped these roads through it. It’s also a place of contention when the New Zealand Government is trying to reopen cast mine all over this area. There’s a lot of protesting in that space. When I took those photos, someone slashed my tyres, perhaps because I was up in the area and they thought I was involved in the protests. So it’s a heavily contentious space. I quite like the idea of rock as flesh as well, minerality and blood.
There’s something engaging about these not being idealised versions of these locations.
There’s a prescribed convention to what landscape photography is. The Wānaka tree photo is the classic one I always draw on. There’s conventions of perfect lighting and focus and you can Google what’s the best lens range of zoom to use for landscape photography. On the surface that might create a beautiful image, but I think it’s interesting to be able to look past that and investigate kind of why those conventions exist. I guess what I’m trying to achieve is having something else going on in the photos. Where a viewer might think, ‘Oh, that’s really nice, but then, wait, hold on, why? What is it about them that feels sort of different or strange or weird?’
You’ve presented the photographs intentionally large, what’s behind that choice?
Scale is a powerful tool. With these images especially, I enjoy the idea of them looming and being kind of in your face. I want them to feel life-like in terms of scale. The triptych is taken in a way where it’s surveilling the space. If you look at 19th century photography in New Zealand, there is a lot of these big panoramas of beautiful untouched worlds. I’m playing on those conventions. Mark Adams is a classic example of someone who plays with that a lot in terms of panoramas. For the installation of the photographs, if you put the space higher and you have to kind of look up at it, it towers over you. Those subtle little things can be used as tools to make the image feel a bit more sort of engaging and speak to what I’m thinking about.
Do you want people to know where these photographs are taken?
No, kind of the opposite. I like people not knowing where they are. Once again, it’s a liminality. These spaces are photographed because they’re important to me or important to engage with what I’m thinking about, but at the same time, the specificity of the location isn’t actually important to the work. It’s specific because it invokes and works with what I’m trying to do, but I don’t think you need to know that. With the literal aspect of photographs, when people do recognise them, the work then becomes more about what the photograph is of. It can be great to have those personal connections if a viewer has them, but that’s removed from what the work’s about.
You’ve titled the show ‘Self’ – what led you to that?
It’s a reference to an image of my granddad welding. It’s an old one from his photo books from the 1940s, he must have been about 18. He’s written ‘Self’ in his own handwriting below it. It was interesting this personification of himself as a working man. In terms of the work, it’s looking at how that mentality and this way of viewing yourself has impacted on how I see and engage with space. I guess the reason the show is titled ‘Self’ is that this is deeply personal and the spaces are deeply personal, but at the same time, as with that photo, you can’t see the person, there’s an obscured face. So, when you ask, is it important that people know where these images are taken? I like that obscurity of it. A sort of loss or unknowing aspect.
