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Was Peter Peryer’s project tied to its time and place? Robert Leonard offers an old-white-male perspective.

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New Zealand photographer Peter Peryer died in 2018 aged seventy-seven. Four years earlier, critic Peter Ireland observed that Peryer’s curators and writers tend to be ‘baby boomers’, ‘born well before 1980’, and that ‘the Peryer orthodoxy’ is ‘now a period piece itself’.¹ A new documentary, Peter Peryer: The Art of Seeing, seems to agree, wheeling out a procession of authoritative old white men (my friends) to explain the work.² For them and me, who were there at the time, Peryer’s work will always be radioactive with significance. However, I find it hard to explain to millennials and to visitors to our shores why Peryer has been so important (to us) and why they might care. Perhaps, ultimately, his importance will be tied to his time and place.

If you didn’t know, Peter Peryer is a giant in New Zealand photography. He came to the medium late, in his early thirties, in the early 1970s. In New Zealand back then, photography was a separate scene, with its own gurus, spaces, and journal. It hadn’t yet merged with the art world proper. Peryer would play a key role in the campaign for it to be recognised as art—his work epitomising why it should be. 

From the outset, Peryer was special. He began as an expressionist, making brooding portraits and haunted location studies. He often used a Diana camera, exploiting the toy device with its distorting plastic lens to imbue his subjects with angst. His portraits were mostly of women—especially his wife/muse Erika—and of himself.³ They were compared to passion plays and psychodrama—the ex-Catholic seemed to be working through stuff. Peryer’s work proved an overnight sensation. It was swiftly profiled in the local photography journal PhotoForum and in Britain’s 1978 Creative Camera Yearbook, and picked up for shows.

A change of heart in the early 1980s saw Peryer largely jettison portraiture and adopt a cooler, more formalist, ‘clinical’ approach. He went on to make still lifes, animal studies, botanical studies, location shots, landscapes. He explored New Zealand’s scenic vistas, tourist spots, and back blocks, its flora and fauna, and its cultural talismans, revelling in their settler-colonial ambience. But he also threw in odd shots from travels abroad (the Statue of Liberty at Denmark’s Legoland). His subjects ranged from nice (flowers) to nasty (a sheep carcass spilling its guts, the swastika on a V1 rocket). He didn’t work much in series, preferring to generate singular images of singular subjects in odd treatments and sizes. His shows often felt like miscellanies.

Peryer’s work had a familiar, belated, nostalgic quality, keyed to photography as a memorialising medium. Much of it seemed concerned with the New Zealand of his childhood. With his early Diana-camera pictures, the déjà-vu aspect was emphasised by a soft-focus style, yet it persisted in his subsequent sharp-focus work. Peryer’s work was never avantgarde. It wasn’t about pioneering new ways of photographic seeing, but about revisiting earlier ones, both art and vernacular ones—the snapshot, pictorialism, scenic postcards, new objectivity, botanical photography, etcetera. There was seldom anything topical within his pictures to reveal that they had been taken only yesterday. Plus, Peryer typically presented them old-school style, as small, black-and-white prints in white mats, in frames. Their time-warped, secondhand, quotational quality found Peryer included in the 1989 show Imposing Narratives: Beyond the Documentary in Recent New Zealand Photography—not that he was remotely interested in postmodernism.⁴

Peryer was obsessive. He talked about his image making as if it were a grail quest. He was known for contriving his apparently found subjects: having a model bus built (The Meccano Bus, 1994), tarting up a playground drawing (New Zealand, 1991), and killing a grin of possums before getting one with its tail just right (Trap, 1991). He had a knack for making his subjects his own. Curator Jim Barr famously observed that Christine Mathieson was nothing like Peryer’s 1977 portrait.⁵ 

A restless autodidact, Peryer juggled all manner of niche interests. A 1994 documentary finds him dripping ink into water to photograph the patterns.⁶ He said it was his second attempt to get the picture, having tried six to eight years earlier. No work eventuated because, I assume, the results didn’t satisfy him. But it was sometimes odd what did. While he produced stunning, iconic images, some pictures were deadpan, unremarkable thematically and formally, their only distinguishing feature being that he considered them worthy, leaving us scratching our heads.

While Peryer’s project was explicitly about the singular image, implicitly it was all about affinities and cross-references between images. His work cultivated close readers attuned to his auteurism, to telltale resonances between pictures—rhymes in subject matter and treatment. Fans observed his penchant for patterns, aerial views, ambiguities of scale, phallic objects. Although Peryer admitted that he favoured certain ‘templates’, it all seemed hardwired. The insistent peculiarities of his way of seeing may have been a mystery to him too.

Accumulating over decades, Peryer’s work has become a mind map—a guide to (or stand-in for) the world and himself. Historian Peter Simpson called it ‘Peryerland’.⁷ In this secondhand universe, individual pictures operate like nodes in a mysterious implied emotional-energy field, leaving us to speculate on the precise and full nature of their interconnection. Some—shots of a satellite dish, a trig station, a power substation, a pylon, a radio mast, a racecourse observation tower—admit this, as visible pointers to invisible links.

Peryer spoke and wrote a lot about his individual works—particularly what attracted him to their subjects—while remaining oddly quiet about his overall approach, his art-world strategy, which made it seem like he didn’t have one. Yet this approach proved compelling. As much as Peryer griped about museums, their curators favoured him. His work was incorporated into diverse shows and arguments. In many ways, his ideal viewers were curator types, keen to find links, to join dots.

Despite enjoying international recognition, Peryer’s work was always a New Zealand thing. Not only are his subjects mostly from here, the work’s reception has been here. His project coevolved with its local audience, who became extremely familiar with the work, enabling the close reading it increasingly seemed to demand. Peryer fans looked forward to his latest ‘new picture’, for how it would elaborate on or derange their understanding of his oeuvre. Overseas, Peryer was another photographer; in New Zealand, he was a paradigm.

Peryer did things to stay current. In the twenty-first century, he abandoned the darkroom, preferring digital cameras and processes—even shooting pictures on his iPhone. He turned to colour and printed big. Nevertheless, his m.o. was grounded in an earlier time. Today—as we operate in a post-medium-art moment, a digital-photography moment, a post-conceptual-photography moment, a wall-scale-photography moment—Peryer looks anachronistic. To my generation, his work was consciously quotational, subtly time warped, and faux naive, but, to new audiences, coming in cold, and with different expectations of photography, I fear it will look simply derivative, old, naive, with all nuance lost. I can’t see the uncanny compositional isomorphism of Peryer’s European Hare (2008) and his Camelia (2010) persisting as a burning issue for the culture.

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Peryer once told me about a book idea—Peter Peryer’s Alphabet—reproducing twenty-six of his photos, one for each letter.⁸ A is for Alligator … But he lamented that he wasn’t ready yet. There were many candidates for some letters; for a few, nothing. He’d get there one day, he promised.

I loved the concept. It was accessible and gimmicky—the book could have been popular. It was also canny, foregrounding his desire to make his defining images of subjects. His work had come to feel like a personal dictionary or encyclopedia.

Everything that can be said can be said using twenty-six letters, but twenty-six photos will never be enough. While Peter Peryer’s Alphabet may have represented some goal of completion, it also pointed to the arbitrariness of making any finite group of images stand in for the world or the artist. But, I guess, Peryer considered the alphabet was as good a curatorial framing—or unframing—device as any.

The book concept stuck with me. I wanted it to happen. In later years, when I saw Peryer, I would raise it. ‘What happened to Peter Peryer’s Alphabet? Do you have all the images yet?’, I would ask. But Peryer would look at me nonplussed. He seemed to have forgotten it was his idea. He’d moved on. 

Peryer’s gone now, so his Alphabet book will never happen and I can’t press him over it any more. Paradoxically, however, an oeuvre that seemed tantalisingly incomplete and always ‘becoming’ is now a closed book, and no one can enjoy it in quite the ways we did before. You had to be there. Sorry.

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[IMAGE Peter Peryer European Hare 2008]