Artist: Mark Adams

Mark Adams: A Survey | He Kohinga Whakaahua offers the first comprehensive survey of New Zealand photographer Mark Adams' work, showcasing more than 65 works spanning his 50-year career. Bringing together black-and-white and colour photographs made decades apart, it examines his compelling and distinctive approach to image-making in Aotearoa.

I visited the Mark Adams show at the Auckland Art Gallery today and was particularly stunned by this image. The empty foreground, with its dull colours, speaks of emptiness, as if something is missing. This is something I would like to achieve with my work.

^{11.5.2000. Site of Hinemihi, Te Wairoa The Buried Village
C type prints from 10 x 8 inch C41 negatives
1275 x 3060 mm
edition 2 of 7}

Reading about this exhibition:

• Auckland Art Gallery: https://www.aucklandartgallery.com/whats-on/exhibition/mark-adams-a-survey-or-he-kohinga-whakaahua
   
• Sarah Farrar. “About Time: The Photography of Mark Adams.” ArtToi, April 2025.
  p.8. "Adams was drawn to places where Pākehā settlement could be seen to have encroached on whenua Māori - sites 'riven by divided memories'."
  p. 14 "- his acknowledgement of what is often erased from historical accounts or overlooked." Referring to Adams' wariness of historical accounts.
  p. 14 Nicolas Thomas concludes in the afterword to a new book about Adams - "that other kind of witnessing". It reminds me of Richard Shaw in his book The Forgotten Coast. "Best I end the forgetting."
  "All of Mark Adams' work has amounted to that other kind of witnessing, a witnessing of context, a witnessing of what has been taken away, hidden or forgotten, as well as what can be seen there, that was always there, or has just been introduced."
  "The fragmenting into three panels .. evokes the parcelling up of land for sale during the colonial settlement of Aotearoa..."
  p. 16 "simultaneously placing viewers in the 'there then' of the event and the 'here now' of the viewing."
   
• Two Rooms exhibition with the same work included: https://tworooms.co.nz/exhibitions/hinemihi-te-hokinga-mai-the-return/
  "These photographs are of something that has passed away and something that is about to set off on another of its travels."