2000
Through commandeering the equipment of industrial surveyors - specifically that of an aerial photographer1 - I present a vertical aerial photograph (the view looking straight down as opposed to an oblique view) which maps the narrow tract of Auckland’s Karangahape Road (also known as K RD) and its surrounding area (including some of the motorway system).
In doing so it is my intent to present another view (post REDEYE) of my urban corridor/tunnel, specifically a macro view loaded as it is with the connotations of an “eye of god” perspective.
In presenting a foreign, and for the most part inaccessible, perspective of a familiar and constantly traversed urban locale, I position the viewer as a giant. K Hole plays on associations of high and low culture within this stereotypically loaded site. Erasing the familiar ground level iconography of “the strip” - sex shops, glue sniffers, and the Las Vegas girl - I render this urban precinct anonymous, displacing its ‘low level’ narrative yet simultaneously depicting its autonomous visual structure. The resultant images are at once generic - like many other locales - and yet specific - individual as only ‘the strip’ can be.
The name “Karangahape Road” on its own, carries enough narrative potential to conjure up visions of a culture that sits uncomfortably within the mainstream. This project plays on the ambiguities presented by such a culture and the problems associated with representing one, particularly through the medium of photography.
When viewing aerial photographs one experiences a feeling of disorientation just as when viewing an isolated page in an A to Z map book. In the process of getting one’s bearings in this miniaturised and isolated view “the strip”, as it is experienced daily, takes on a new persona. The aerial photograph manipulates the way the viewer sees K road, emphasising its structure, location and psychological boundaries. That is, foregrounding its relation to, and its isolation from, the rest of the city.
In choosing to utilise a method of photography usually applied to town planning, and surveillance, I marry two seemingly incongruous ideologies, that of the control represented by the intent of commercial aerial photography and the chaos or lack of control that K Road represents to the wider public.
Ann Shelton 2000
I commissioned an Aerial photographer to make a fly over of Karangahape road. ↩
