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At City Gallery, we are currently presenting photographer Jono Rotman’s Mongrel Mob Portraits, featuring members of the notorious New Zealand street gang. The subject matter is contentious, even incendiary, but Rotman offers his subjects without indictment. His Mob photos were first shown last year at a dealer gallery, Auckland’s Gow Langsford Gallery, where they proved controversial. For City Gallery, co-curator Aaron Lister and I added in new Rotman images to expand on the Gow Langsford show. We were particularly keen to include Sean Wellington and Sons (2009). In this portrait, Sean turns his back to us—we see his patch, but not his face. He carries his two sons, who face us. They wear tiny Mongrel Mob shirts. It’s the sweetest and the heaviest image in the show. People see gangs as abhorrent but also see children as innocent, and it’s hard to reconcile these assumptions when you look at this picture. You realise that people are born into gangs and that the Mob is a community generations deep. While Rotman’s other portraits are about what has happened (he refers to his sitters as ‘artefacts’), Sean Wellington and Sons is about the future—what will happen. It prompts us to imagine the lives these boys will live. Jono Rotman: Mongrel Mob Portraits, City Gallery, until 14 June.