The Close of an Age
In the corner of Claude Lorrain’s 1654 Landscape with Hagar and the Angel stands an elegant classical ruin.
This Baroque vision of an ancient past has, since 1982, offered visitors to Dunedin Public Art Gallery a rare glimpse of romantic decay. Photographer Allan McDonald recognises quiet grandeur in marginal architecture. For him, the abandoned service stations of Newtown and Wingate echo classical structures, like Lorrain’s Corinthian columns and moss-covered architrave. In February 2011, architectural ruins burst into New Zealand’s collective psyche with devastating force in the wake of the Christchurch earthquake. The first time McDonald went to the post-quake city he returned with a single image of an overgrown bower of roses above a cracked driveway. The straight style and muted pathos of this photograph is characteristic of his wider practice chronicling systemic change affecting urban decline.
In 2017, McDonald’s won the New Zealand Photobook of the Year. The book’s title evokes the same colonial optimism as the names of such newspapers as and . In a recent body of work, McDonald typology or series. They follow a model of practice established by German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who photographed relics of industry with a clinical and exacting fidelity, methodically cataloguing each type of structure into a typology. Within the broad realm of documentary photography, McDonald’s record-keeping of urban deterioration operates at a measured pace, built up through a considered accretion of images of the same subject found in different locations. His interest in the repetition of certain forms substantiates the idea of the everyday. Typologies provide McDonald with an organising structure for the eye, but the categories themselves remain open. flows into , , and . Collectively, these bodies of work reveal cultural patterns and reinforce a sense of the conditions of sites in transition.
