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The colonists arrived with their pianos and their bibles, ready to transform wild New Zealand into an idea of idyllic, pastoral England—to make it home. Here, they would perfect a conflicted sense of ‘home’. It would be where they hailed from and where they now laid their heads—their home away from home. Both would become equally homely and unhomely. Pākehā artist Gavin Hipkins explores this colonial condition and its legacy in his new work, The Homely II (2001–17). This epic frieze of eighty photos, taken on touristic excursions in New Zealand and the United Kingdom, scrambles here and there.

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The Original
Unveiled at City Gallery Wellington in the show This Is New Zealand (2018), The Homely II is the sequel to Hipkins’s The Homely (1997–2000), which also debuted at City Gallery, seventeen years earlier, in 2001.¹ The Homely had the same aesthetic, format, and feel. Both series were shot on an amateur tourist camera. Both featured the same number of photos, framed and presented in the same way. However, The Homely images were shot in New Zealand and Australia. To appreciate the sequel, we need to know the original.

Hipkins called The Homely ‘a postcolonial gothic novel’, adding that he sought to evoke ‘the sense of unease that young nations face in defining nationhood’. Even if they have common origins as British colonies, are neighbours, and have near-identical flags, New Zealand and Australia pride themselves on being different—distinct. But The Homely confounded such nationalism, while playing on the anxiety that underpinned it. Even if the odd location might be recognised, most images could have come from either place (or somewhere else), sending viewers scurrying to the works list for clarification. Despite being cued to read the sequence as a travelogue, viewers necessarily lost their bearings.

The Homely was a miscellany. As a sequence, it suggested a narrative, but a fragmentary, inconclusive one. Shots ranged in register, oscillating between familiar photographic manners: postcard pictorialism, documentary, and snapshot. Some images cued the colonial: a model ship’s rigging, a faux-Māori gateway, and a Union Jack. Some images were taken in museums and at war memorials—favoured sites for national representation—with Hipkins revelling in their more dowdy, forlorn aspects. However, other shots—a tyre swing, a hooded jacket—seemed menacing because oblique or random.

The Homely struck a chord. It became Hipkins’s best-known and most-loved work. It toured to Auckland Art Gallery, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, and Whanganui’s Sarjeant Gallery, and was subsequently shown—whole or in part—in numerous other shows. It was routinely cannibalised by curators to make all manner of points. Wellington’s Te Papa and Auckland Art Gallery both acquired generous selections of the images and Brisbane’s Queensland Art Gallery got a full set. Individual images from the work have became iconic, like multiple hit singles emerging from a great album. (Hipkins’s shot of a figure dwarfed by a waterfall—recalling Caspar David Friedrich’s 1818 painting Wanderer above the Sea of Fog—is the great favourite.) So, it’s no surprise that Hipkins would draw on The Homely’s commercial and artistic success with a follow up.

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The Sequel
The Homely II turns on its sequel status. Like the original, its images encompass tourist spots and more neglected destinations. New Zealand sites include Moeraki (the famous boulders), Milford Sound (the iconic waterfall), Rotorua, and Cape Reinga, as well as obscure backwaters. Hipkins visited colonial-settler museums, documenting cogs at Christchurch’s Ferrymead Heritage Park, a saddle at Nelson’s Founders Heritage Park, and an empty Victorian pram at Houhora’s Wagener Museum. In the old country, he did likewise. He shot a majestic concrete-stag sculpture at Crystal Palace and a tall ship’s rigging in Portsmouth. He shot landscapes in Avebury (standing stones), the Lake District, and Scotland’s national parks, as well as locations associated with the industrial revolution, such as New Lanark and Ironbridge.

Like The Homely, The Homely II is jittery—restless. Hipkins demonstrates a flair for bathos, lurching in tone from the profound to the trivial, the pompous to the vile. There may be grand vistas (like Milford Sound’s waterfall and Westminster viewed across the Thames), but there are also tasteless moments (dead flies on a window sill, a softcore-porn beer-can collection) and the grotesque (a stillborn lamb, an offal pit). There’s tragedy (a crumpled blanket in that empty Victorian pram; a photo of the ill-fated Diana Spencer, with Charles and the boys), but there’s also comedy (sizzling sausages, a faecal-coloured fundraising thermometer). Hipkins tugs the rug.

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Out of Place
The title The Homely nods to Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay on the ‘unheimlich’. This German term translates as ‘unhomely’ or ‘uncanny’, and encapsulates, at once, the familiar (the homely) and the strange (the unhomely). It would seem to fit the home-away-from-home thematic of The Homely II like a glove. However, Hipkins says he thinks of the sequel less in terms of Freud’s ‘uncanny’, more in terms of Mark Fisher’s writings on the ‘weird and eerie’: things out of place, not where they should be.²  

The image that represents physical displacement most explicitly—perhaps the key image in The Homely II—is of the meeting house Hinemihi. Originally situated near Lake Tarawera, Hinemihi sheltered the people of Te Wairoa village during the 1886 Tarawera eruption. In 1892, William Onslow, fourth Earl of Onslow, then Governor of New Zealand, bought it and shipped it to England. It has long been installed in Onslow’s ancestral home, Clandon Park in Guildford, Surrey. It ended up there as the colony set up shop here. In Hipkins’s photo, it seems out of place in the English landscape. A souvenir.

Actually, in The Homely II, there are other potential key images. We can read the entire sequence through the Hinemihi image, but we can also read it through the Diana-and-Charles image (something rotten in the house of Windsor) or the image of a wrecked house hanging over the cliff at post-earthquake Sumner (colonials building their houses on sand). Then again, we can read it all through the Ferrymead image. The antique cogs are stacked neatly (vertically), but are no longer part of a functioning machine—their purpose has been lost. They are like the images in The Homely II, stacked neatly (horizontally)—disordered cogs from the now-defunct signifying machine of empire. No one knows how to put Humpty back together again.

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Out of Time
Hipkins’s Hinemihi image makes us think about spatial dislocation, but The Homely II is also about temporal dislocation. A time-warped sense of return haunts Hipkins’s entire oeuvre. It was already part of The Homely, but Hipkins adds twists with the sequel.

With both Homelys, there’s a temporal play between the works as collections of deadly still images and as vital unfolding cinematic narratives. Images are sequenced in a prescribed order—this, then this, then this. The sequences feel like travelogues, but the itinerary has no clear spatial or temporal logic, no apparent point. In The Homely II, why would we go from Wainuiomata in 2002 to London in 2015 to St Arnaud in 2005 to Auckland in 2013 to Bovington in 2015 to Wanaka in 2004? That said, there is something dreamlike in the ordering and pacing of apparently unrelated shots. The images seem to be taken on the way to somewhere, leading somewhere, but there’s no resolution; the suspense is never relieved. There could be an unfathomable logic to it all, something we don’t get, maybe something we’ve forgotten.

In both Homelys, Hipkins is drawn to photographing memorials and museums, statues and mannequins, as if making an analogy between their uncanny arrested quality and the memorialising effects of photography. This memorial association spreads out across all the subjects in both friezes. Hipkins plays on the temporal dislocation inherent in photography itself. By arresting time, it frames everything in the future-perfect tense—this will have been. Even with the most contemporary-looking subjects in The Homely II—a petrol bowser and a modern airport runway—it’s like we’re looking back on them from the future, imagining them as akin to colonial-period museum objects—relics.³

While the touristic Hipkins can return to places of historical significance—places already photographed—he can’t return to their significant moments. He’s always belated, stuck in the present. He can travel in space, but not return in time. In The Homely II, this idea is underlined in his photo of a photo of the royals, Charles, Diana, and the boys, taken at Highgrove in happier times. Hipkins’s photo captures glare on the image. This blemish makes us think about the time that elapsed between when the original photo was made (when it signified innocence, optimism, and love) and when Hipkins rephotographed it (after the couple’s bitter split, after Diana’s lonely Taj Mahal photo op, and after she died after crashing in that Paris tunnel). We can’t recapture the innocence, can’t erase hindsight.

There are also new forms of temporal dislocation specific to The Homely II as a sequel. In the cinema, sequels seem to move on in time, but don’t. They loop. They present what happens next in the story, but by riffing on tropes in the original, recycling the same jokes with a twist. Images in The Homely II echo images in The Homely. The Homely features a shot of a model ship’s rigging; The Homely II has one of real ship’s rigging. The Homely includes a shot of archery targets from behind; The Homely II, archery targets from​ the front. Both feature images spoilt by backlit glare; both show woolly-hatted heads from behind. Etcetera. Hipkins’s sequel doubles down on the sense of déjà vu already implicit in the original series.

The idea that Hipkins’s record is stuck is reinforced by the repetition of the same format and aesthetic seventeen years on. Shot on film, The Homely had an analogue look at the end of the analogue-photography era. But The Homely II appears in a moment when digital photography is the norm—today’s tourists don’t use film cameras, they use their phones—yet it has the same look.⁴ It’s as if, uncannily, nothing has changed in between, and Hipkins could simply pick up where he left off. Or is he trapped, personally incapable of doing otherwise? 

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Times change. The cultural assumptions and excuses that animated the colonial project may no longer hold, yet everything we see around us is a consequence. We may operate in a new moment, with new assumptions and excuses to take for granted, but Hipkins either doesn’t see that or won’t let us move on. He nags and mesmerises us with unfinished business—lest we forget, because we forget. He casts us adrift in colonial space-time, without access to coordinates or enough clear reference points, without reassuring maps and clocks, making us hanker for—or fret about—the missing links, the story that might bind and justify these images.

But is Hipkins critiquing the colonial project or basking in its residual background radiation—its afterglow?

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[IMAGE: Gavin Hipkins The Homely II 2001–17]

It Feels Like Yesterday
Gavin Hipkins talks to Aaron Lister and Robert Leonard
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In 2001, Gavin Hipkins unveiled his photo frieze, The Homely, at City Gallery Wellington. Consisting of eighty photos taken between 1997 and 2000 on travels in New Zealand and Australia, neighbouring antipodean colonies, it became his best-known and most celebrated work. In 2018, he unveiled its sequel in the exhibition This Is New Zealand, also at City Gallery. The Homely II also comprises eighty photos, shot in the same manner, arranged in the same frieze format. Hipkins shot the images between 2001 and 2017 on excursions through New Zealand and the United Kingdom, the former colony and the colonial homeland. The Homely and The Homely II are skewed, fractured travelogues. Instead of offering reassuring signs of either belonging and identification or exotic otherness, they trace a more fraught, fragile, restless cultural condition.
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Aaron Lister and Robert Leonard: The Homely is your best-known work.
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Gavin Hipkins: Back in 2001, The Homely struck a chord, resonating with issues of national identity at a key bicultural, postcolonial moment. The work has been shown extensively, in total and in pieces, nationally and internationally, including in the Walters Prize (Auckland Art Gallery, 2002) and Unnerved: The New Zealand Project (Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 2010). Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa own selections of the images, while Queensland Art Gallery has the full set. It remains my most travelled, most loved work. Still, now, there always seem to be one or two images from it on display somewhere.
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Why make a sequel?
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The short answer: unfinished business. There are sequels in literature and film. Making a sequel suggests there wasn’t enough room to tell the whole story within the initial format or timeframe. We compare the original to the sequel to see what’s changed, but also to reevaluate the original. With film sequels especially—from the Alien to the Toy Story franchises—there’s a drive to cash in on the success of the original. However, nostalgia for the originals can also negate the value of sequels.
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No one makes a sequel to a flop.
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I didn’t want The Homely II to suffer from second-album syndrome—when a second album falls flat, when it doesn’t reach the same lofty heights. That’s probably why it took so long to complete.
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How did the sequel idea come into focus?
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The Homely was a conversation between images taken in two antipodean former colonies, New Zealand and Australia. It generated comparisons by juxtaposing images from both. In The Homely II, it’s images from the UK and New Zealand. That might seem to be a simple transition, but it took time to work out whether it was a conversation worth pursuing. It took time for me to build momentum and commitment for it.
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In a sequel, the story continues, but it’s marked by the repetition of tropes from the original.
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Both series operate within the same parameters. Both were shot on film using a small, amateur camera, with the aesthetic oscillating between pictorialist, documentary, and snapshot. Landscape traditions, including the picturesque and the sublime, play across both. The idea of collecting images through travel is consistent—both series are fragmented travelogues. In both, the images are the same size, there are the same number of them, and they are presented in the same frieze format. The images are not singular, isolated within matts, but abut one another. Each image affects the way we read those adjacent. Both series engage our desire for a sense of place, of belonging. Both explore ideas of community and nation by collecting and presenting photographic traces of actual communities and occupations. Both are about intimacy, albeit a dysfunctional one.
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How do the Homely projects differ?
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The Homely II was never going to tune in to the same postcolonial zeitgeist. It’s part of an overlapping but new cultural moment. It aligns with other concerns, particularly republican discussions like the flag referendum. It addresses Commonwealth romanticism—our specific relationship, real and imagined, to the motherland, at the end of empire.
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What does the Commonwealth mean to you? 
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Empire with blurred borders. The Commonwealth is an idea, an ideological construct. My generation had a sense of it through our grandparents’ and parents’ relationships to Britain. My parents—both Pākehā New Zealanders—were married in London. I remember my father’s stamp collection and tuning in to the Queen’s speech on TV. My brothers and I were boy scouts. Later, there was my proverbial OE, where my mates and I bought a VW Kombi van and took off to Britain and Europe with other young Kiwis and Aussies. As an artist, I’ve made works across the settler colonies of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, and I’ve explored Commonwealth literature through unpacking postwar boys-own annuals in my Empire series (2007).
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Does The Homely II make sense on its own or do we have to read it as a sequel?
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Others will have to answer this, but I suspect it makes sense on its own. It could also be a prompt for younger audiences to discover the original.
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Is unfinished business ever finished?
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It’s conceivable that a number of Homely projects addressing different territories could eventuate. I’ve staged similar conversations in other projects. For example, my short film This Fine Island (2012) maps Darwin’s observations of Northland via a bicultural romance. When I was applying for funding, its working title was The Homely II, which was a way of saying ‘this is important—it’s linked to The Homely’.
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The Homely II incorporates images from 2001 on, but when did the idea take shape? When did you start photographing with the project in mind?
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It’s complicated. In 2001, I was thinking of a series with pictures from London, Paris, Rome, Amsterdam, and other European imperial capitals to be called The Last Empire. Returning to New Zealand, after studying in Vancouver in 2002 and having just completed another frieze, The Next Cabin (2002), I started photographing in earnest towards The Homely II. Then, the series was just going to be just pictures from New Zealand. Some of the images were cannibalised for other projects—Romance (2003) and The Village (2006). I kept travelling through New Zealand with my wife Kinstry and our newborn son Jaspar, photographing with the same simple film camera. I also took specific South Island road trips in 2004 and 2007 with my old mate, photographer Ian Richardson (whose work featured in Folklore: The New Zealanders, the group show I curated at Artspace in 1998). The collecting continued but slowed when I  began working with digital montage and making short films. In 2012, I commenced my first feature film, Erewhon (2014), and started planning photographic excursions again. It was a great opportunity to reconnect with the project. Then, in 2014, while on sabbatical, I travelled to Edinburgh to be part of the exhibition Where Do I End and You Begin, which featured artists from Commonwealth countries. In 2015, I returned to the UK with the family, a camera, sixty rolls of film, and a road map. The UK photos were mostly taken then. I sought out specific locations I thought would be photogenic, but the other consideration was to have a sense of travel adventure with the kids (aged seven and twelve at the time).
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So, you were being a tourist while commenting on the tourist condition.
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For my UK itinerary, I worked from a book called 501 Days Out for Kids in the UK and Ireland. It provided an excellent sample of heritage-themed attractions, from Avebury to Minerva Lead Mines in Wales, from HMS Belfast on the Thames to Wookey Hole Caves. My only regret is we didn’t have the time to visit all 501.
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When we see your travel companions, it’s from behind, concealing their identities.
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People are usually out of shot, but their presence is implied. When we do see them, it’s from behind, and they’re concealed by hats and hoods. There’s my son Jaspar at St Andrews, a twelve-year-old in his armour-helmet-like knitted woollen hat; my daughter Milla, looking at exploding fireworks at the end of our street in Titirangi; and Kinstry, photographing Avebury’s stone circles. There’s also a friend, Bryce Galloway, wrapped in a towel. The subjects are always engaged in an activity, even if it’s simply looking out over the vista. Ownership of land is connoted.
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Before you take an image, do you have a clear idea whether you’ll use it?
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Not usually. There are exceptions, like the image of Hinemihi from Clandon Park. Sometimes images arose from visiting photogenic sites like Balmoral Castle, the Royal Family’s Scottish estate, purchased by Prince Albert. I had a feeling it would be a worthwhile visit. Sure enough, several Balmoral images ended up in The Homely II. At other times, making images relies on having a camera on hand, at friends’ homes, kids’ birthday parties, weddings, school fairs, etcetera. The decision to use an image takes place at edit stage: how compelling is it, how does it work in the series, what does it add? The editing process is lengthy.
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What guides the sequencing?
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There has to be a feeling of cinematic continuity and coherence. The images need to work together, to rhyme, through subject matter, treatment, and composition. The sequencing is somewhat structuralist, with consideration of denotative, connotative, and playful meanings.
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Does a narrative underpin the sequence?
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Yes. I wanted to create a sense of narrative, but a fragmented one. It’s simple. The sequence begins in the mountains and ends at the beach, or the other way round, depending on which end you start at. There are loosely-defined chapters, including a folksy fairground chapter, an abject chapter, and a monarchy chapter (with photos of photos of the Royal Family). The chapters blur into each other, but they help order the project.
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Will it always be arranged in the same fashion, with images in the same order?
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Some of my other series can be mixed up, but with The Homely and The Homely II there’s a set order, a linear narrative. It could start at this end or the other. But, either way, there’s a sequential flow which I’ve worked on—it’s a given. I foresee having conversations with curators about what would be the best way to sequence smaller selections of images for specific shows, as happened with The Homely, but I prefer the effect of the full frieze.

It was lovely seeing people interact with the full version of The Homely in Unnerved at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane in 2010, watching them flow in and out of the sequence, and seeing where, for various reasons, they stalled.
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In The Homely, it’s sometimes hard to know whether we’re in New Zealand or Australia, and, in The Homely II, whether we’re in New Zealand or the UK. In both, we get lost.
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You’re presented with sets of images and it’s difficult to know where or when they were taken. Some spots may be recognisable. If you’re from New Zealand, you may recognise Milford Sound, the Alexandra Clock, the Moeraki Boulders, Cape Reinga, or Rotorua. If you’re from the UK, you could recognise the shell grotto at Margate or the River Thames. Importantly, for the images’ documentary value, there is an accompanying title list available in the show. You can just look at the images and wonder where they are from, or go through the show with the list and identify where they are from.
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The work doesn’t stay in register. There are sublime vistas, like the waterfall at Milford Sound, but also tasteless moments, like a bloody stillborn lamb, an offal pit, and sizzling sausages next to a faecal fundraising thermometer.
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There’s tragedy—the shot of grubby fabric in the empty Victorian pram and the shot of the photo of Charles, Diana, and the boys in happier times. I wanted it to exude a sense of rot and decay, but playfully. There’s also horror and comedy. The project doesn’t take itself too seriously. There’s enough earnest New Zealand postcolonial photography out there already.
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What attracts you to small heritage museums, like Ferrymead Heritage Park, Christchurch, and Founders Heritage Park, Nelson?
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They present the colonial story of Pākehā pioneers breaking in the land. They are mostly renovated buildings that look like old ones. The displays tend to be less polished, as if put together by enthusiastic volunteers working with small budgets. They can feel warmer than big museums, but some are downright spooky. Standing alone among these collections of artefacts on an overcast winter’s day can be disconcerting.
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You went to similar sites in the UK, including the Annie McLeod Experience Ride at New Lanark, on the River Clyde. There, you photographed a sculpture of Annie McLeod.
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She represents the child workers employed in the New Lanark cotton mill during the industrial revolution. The mill was progressive and humane—it incorporated a school. In the ride, McLeod tells her story of growing up there. I didn’t get a chance to take the ride, and initially snapped the sculpture without understanding her story. In the sequence, that photo sits alongside one of the Clyde. This is one of those rare moments in the sequence where it doesn’t jump around, but enables a connection between adjacent subjects to unfold.
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The heritage industry is a key theme.
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The heritage industry is important again, with films like The Queen and television series like The Crown. There’s a dark side to it, with Britain grasping for its national identity in a time of turbulent change. It was the same in the Thatcher years, when the National Trust and heritage industry came to the fore to proclaim how great the nation was after the demise of empire.
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When did you first go to the UK?
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I was sixteen. My father worked for Air New Zealand and we were able to travel cheaply under the company’s staff-travel scheme. I bought my first camera in a duty-free shop at Auckland Airport in 1984, while en route to London with my family. I read the manual on the flight and figured out how to use it. I made snaps at Madame Tussauds and London Bridge, the same touristic territory that appears in The Homely II. In 1989, in my early twenties, I returned for my OE. I lived in pubs in London and experienced the miseries of Thatcher’s Britain first hand. It was a depressing experience. England was lost; I was lost. It would be another decade before I returned, in the summer of 2001, when I started work on the series. I attempted to revisit the pubs where I’d lived, but they had been replaced with apartments. The King George IV pub in Montpelier Square had stood since the 1820s. When I saw Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994) in the mid-1990s, I was touched by his portrayal of ‘the problem of London’.
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You called The Homely a ‘postcolonial Gothic novel’. What would you call The Homely II?
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I came up with that catchphrase for The Homely and it stuck. I think The Homely II is more ‘Victorian melodrama’. Its nineteenth-century framework connects sites and events: from the transportation of Hinemihi to the importance of Ironbridge for the industrial revolution. The risk is that ‘Victorian melodrama’ sounds a bit serious, a bit too The Piano. I’m still searching for a tagline to describe The Homely II.
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The sequence includes a photo of a photo of Victoria on horseback, with her Scottish groom. There’s another photo of a photo, of Charles, Diana, and the boys caught in a now-ironic golden glow. If Victoria is the heyday of the empire and aristocracy, Charles and Diana feel like its undoing.
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Yes, here’s the melodrama. The family photo of Charles and Diana and their sons was taken in Highgrove, before the divorce, before Diana’s death. Standing in front of it at Balmoral years later, that glint of light reflected in Diana’s face recalls the obscure marks of foreboding captured in photos in the horror film The Omen (1976).
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A key theme is obsolescence or redundancy: an empire that no longer operates, a failed royal marriage, cogs from disassembled machines. Even when we see very current images, it’s like you’re asking us to imagine them viewed from the future, in the future-perfect tense—they ‘will have been’.
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This remains the power of photography. The gas station and airport runway are current technologies but become inherently obsolete once photographed. Chris Marker mined this idea in his film La Jetée (1962).
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Between making The Homely and The Homely II, photography has changed. Everything’s digital now.
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The Homely II mimics the analogue look of the original, based on film and chemical processing. The Homely II images were shot on film, but were scanned and printed digitally. This mimicking of an earlier process brings a nostalgic dimension. There’s something odd and haunting in repeating the format of the original. It implies that there have been no technological developments, that we haven’t actually left the analogue-technology period, that we are stuck.
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Between 2001 and 2017, something else changed. You became a filmmaker. How did that inform The Homely II?
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My photo-installations were always cinematic. In a way, they are more cinematic than my films. They deconstruct the filmic process and expose the role of the single image within the illusion of narrative continuity. I am not sure how becoming a filmmaker has substantially changed how I edited and sequenced The Homely II. Perhaps I’m more aware of associative jumps across montaged elements.
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In The Homely II, does Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny remain a reference point?
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Not as pointedly. The Homely spoke to Freud’s famous 1919 essay, ‘The Uncanny’. In a way, The Homely was already in conversation with an earlier project, The Unhomely, a show of photos from the Alexander Turnbull Library that I curated in 1997. In both, I was interested in Freud’s idea that the homely and unhomely are connected and interchangeable—they are ‘that class of the terrifying’ that’s both familiar and unfamiliar. But, in The Homely II, I attempted to move on.

The Homely II is more about the eerie. In his book, The Weird and the Eerie, the English writer Mark Fisher argues that there’s been too much emphasis on Freud’s uncanny. He suggests we should be reconsidering the categories of the weird and the eerie instead. For Fisher, the eerie occurs when we stumble across something which shouldn’t be there; for example, if we step out into Civic Square and find a 747 parked there. We also encounter the eerie when we expect something to be there and it isn’t—it’s disappeared.

A key image is of the beautiful wharenui Hinemihi in Clandon Park, south of London. Viewers might first assume it’s been shot in Aotearoa, but it hasn’t. It doesn’t look right. Some Ngāti Hinemihi survived the 1886 Tarawera eruption sheltering in it. Then, about five years later, it was transported to the UK. (Mark Adams has also photographed it.) The Hinemihi story looks back to one of the most iconic images in The Homely, Te Wairoa (Falls) (1999), showing a figure by a waterfall. It’s shot in the area Hinemihi comes from. There’s something cyclical there that speaks to notions of placement and displacement, longing and belonging, and the eerie. After Clandon Park House was gutted by a fire in 2015, a conversation must be open for the wharenui to return home, to Te Wairoa.
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In This Is New Zealand, the very appearance of The Homely II seemed eerie.
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In This Is New Zealand, some of those familiar with The Homely experienced a double take. At first, they were unsure of the status of the work—was it a new suite of photos or the same? This confusion was compounded by the fact that The Homely itself could have been included in the show. It was a double bluff, where the familiar-unfamiliar was played out in the presentation of a sequel in the absence of the original.
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Apart from Hinemihi (Clandon), are there other iconic ‘hinge’ images? 
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Images become iconic. They take time to float to the surface. The Homely II is still young. I think the shot of Charles, Diana, and the boys and the shot of a wrecked house over Sumner Beach following the Christchurch earthquake may become iconic.
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The Sumner image recalls Peter Peryer’s shot of the divided house from Mars Hotel. Peryer seems to haunt your work. Early on, he also made disjointed, melancholy photo-sequences using a cheap Diana camera—Mars Hotel and Gone Home (both 1975). His retro aesthetics also meander between modernist formalism, postcard pictorialism, and the snapshot. How do you see your project in relation to his?
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With his celebration of the vernacular, Peryer influenced my early photography. I was impressed by the way he understood the constructed nature of photography and his complete passion for the medium. Even though his images could look entirely found, he wouldn’t shy away from fabricating elements to exaggerate particular qualities. His work functions between the found and the constructed—like all good documentary work. Inevitably, comparisons between us will be made, especially when I knowingly return to some of the same touristic locations that Peryer has photographed, including the Alexandra Clock and Moeraki Boulders. We are both attracted to photogenic subjects that have attracted photographers before us. But Peryer and I also have very different methodologies. While he made singular, iconic images that relate to one another across his oeuvre, I collect images for a specific project and present them together as installations. He presented his images matted and framed in a standard way, while my work explores and plays with modes of presentation.