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Come and see my latest show—John Lethbridge: Divination: Performance Photographs 1978–82 at Webb’s new space in Marion Street, Wellington (until 23 April 2022). Lethbridge featured in Action Replay: Post-Object Art—a series of shows I curated with Tina Barton, Wystan Curnow, and John Hurrell back in 1998—and has been on my mind ever since. It’s great to finally do this show. 

Born in Wellington, Lethbridge started out as a printmaker, but went on to study under Jim Allen at Elam in Auckland in the early 1970s, joining the post-object-art set. (His show Formal Enema Enigma was part of Auckland City Art Gallery’s 1975 Project Programme.) He moved to Australia at the beginning of  1976 and bought a Hasselblad camera. The iconic staged photographs he made in the late 1970s and early 1980s have one foot in the literalism of performance documentation and another in the glitz of fashion photography. Equal parts Joseph Beuys and Helmut Newton, they scrambled genuine psycho-spiritual enquiry with camp theatrics, and epitomised the postmodern turn.

Many of Lethbridge’s photos feature performer–assistant Jane Campion. His 1978 series Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival was shot at her family farm at Peka Peka. It includes The Ride, showing a gender-bending Campion riding a saddle mounted on a stepladder, carrot in one hand, riding crop in the other. Tally ho! Essay here.
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[IMAGE: John Lethbridge Farm Life: An Exercise in Survival: The Ride 1978]
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