It was late 2013. I was passing through Auckland on route to Wellington, to start my new job as Chief Curator at City Gallery. I’d been out of New Zealand for eight years and was on the look-out for something local to show, something new to me that would also be new to the audience, something surprising, something arresting. In the offices of Gow Langsford Gallery, I found it. I came upon Jono Rotman’s portraits of members of the Mongrel Mob, New Zealand’s largest gang. Gow Langsford was planning its first show with the photographer—the unveiling of his Mob work. The portraits were stunning, but confusing. I was used to seeing gang members in unflattering mugshots and long-lens newspaper photos, but I didn’t expect to see them like this—posing patiently, complicit. I wondered how they came to be photographed in this way and what it meant to them.

Rich in documentary detail, in evidence, Rotman’s portraits invited me to play anthropologist, sociologist, criminologist; to take stock of the sitters’ tribal talismans (their patches, their Nazi insignia and Stahlhelms, and their ‘masks’—their facial tattoos) and to assess their physical condition (one had a blind eye). However, they were also rhetorical. With his densely tattooed face, Dennis Makalio (Denimz Rogue, 2009) struck a noble big-chief pose, recalling Charles Goldie’s and Gottfried Lindauer’s paintings of Māori and Edward S. Curtis’s photos of American Indian chiefs. Meanwhile, Shane Harrison (Shano Rogue, 2010) played the brooding henchman, glaring out from under his hoodie. His portrait reminded me of movie characters: Darth Maul, from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999), and the Venerable Jorge, the monk librarian, from the medieval whodunnit, The Name of the Rose (1986).

I wasn’t sure if I engaged with Rotman’s subjects thoughtfully and respectfully or as exotic specimens. But, I also wondered, should I engage with them thoughtfully and respectfully? And, if so, perhaps the only way I could was as the Other, that providing a necessary distance. Rotman’s portraits made me realise I knew nothing about New Zealand gangs and made me wonder why that was.

Gangs are a polarising subject. Some see them as causes of social ills, others as effects. They have long been part of New Zealand’s social fabric, our national story, and, as poverty persists, they aren’t going away. The Mongrel Mob has a reputation for crimes, organised and disorganised.¹ It had its roots in the 1960s, when, according to legend, some miscreants appearing before the Hasting’s Magistrates Court were denounced as ‘mongrels’ and embraced the name.² Although its founders were mostly Pākehā, the Mob is now predominantly Polynesian and largely Māori. It’s often said that gangs provide an alternative tribal structure for detribalised, disenfranchised Māori youths. Today, the Mob is big, with some thirty chapters throughout New Zealand, and it’s expanding into Australia. Over the years, members have grown older and settled down, losing their desire and capacity for mayhem and seeking better lives for themselves and their families. That said, there are always new bad news items to counter this impression. Mob members alone account for over a tenth of New Zealand’s prison population.³

Rotman’s Mob portraits evolved out of a previous project. In Lockups (2000–5), he photographed interiors of New Zealand courtrooms, prisons, and asylums, casting them as symptoms of colonial trauma, the decline of welfarism, etcetera. His scenes are full of telling details. One of the saddest is South Wing, Mount Eden Men’s Remand Prison (2001). The vanishing point of this grim cellblock vista is a mural reproducing Gottfried Lindauer’s beloved painting, Heeni Hirini and Child (1878). This loving Māori Madonna-and-Child image seems radically out of place in the prison, taunting inmates with the possibility of a cultural and family connection many will never enjoy. After Lockups, Rotman thought to turn his camera on the people missing from, but implicit in, these scenes. 

In 2007, Rotman started photographing Mob members in his studio, but he wasn’t happy with the results. So, he went on the road, photographing them on their own turf, all around the country. Over seven years, he shot, he says, some 200 men, using an old-school large-format view camera, film, and available light. While Lockups showed abandoned spaces (making us speculate about the people who occupied them), the Mob portraits present people against a plain backdrop (making us speculate about the contexts that shaped them). Rotman also shot other images, documenting Mob memorabilia and paraphernalia—patches, photos, newspaper cuttings, graves.

Although he had a wealth of material, Rotman chose to present just eight portraits in his Gow Langsford show. He chose them partly as the best images, partly for representing key Mob figures. He printed them larger than life: around 2 x 1.6 metres, framed. The Gallery knew the show would be challenging. A few days before it opened, the Herald reported: ‘The exhibition has been labelled “disgraceful” by the Sensible Sentencing Trust. Spokeswoman Ruth Money said she worked with the victims of gang members and struggled to understand the justification or thinking behind the photographs. “I think it is glorifying gang culture and completely offensive to their victims, and the members of the public and society who live a socially acceptable and tolerated life.”’⁴

Despite these rumblings, artist and Gallery were taken by surprise when the Herald ran its follow-up story—‘Art or Insult?: Accused Killer in Show’—on the day of the opening, 29 April 2014. Photographed four years earlier, Shane Harrison was now in custody, facing murder charges. The writer, Anna Leask, cited the victim’s father, Iafeta Matalasi, calling for artist and Gallery to remove his image from the show: ‘The family of a young father are disgusted his alleged killer will be “immortalised” in a photo exhibition at an upmarket Auckland art gallery. They say including the accused man in the exhibition is “unacceptable” and have called for his portrait to be withdrawn. However, the gallery will not budge.’⁵  

The article went on: ‘“What this gallery is doing is immortalising him. It doesn’t matter what their view is, that portrait is going to be around forever and to immortalise a person like this is actually wrong”, he [Iafeta Matalasi] said. “It’s a big slap for me and my family. I want the photo excluded. It is utterly unacceptable, in my view.” Iafeta Matalasi said he struggled every day with his son’s death. “I cry every night. I look at my son’s photo and I cry. We are already going through the court case, and now this. It’s just wrong.”‘

Leask’s count was skewed, painting the victim as something of an innocent: ‘Sio Matalasi, who had a young son and a new baby on the way, was not a gang member or associate. However, he was friends with several members of the Petone Mongrel Mob chapter who lived in a nearby flat. When they were confronted by rival Rogue members from Porirua, he stepped in to try to help his mates and was shot during the fracas.’

The truth would prove somewhat more complex. Also, to suggest that having your portrait shown at Gow Langsford is being immortalised was drawing a long bow, and implies that only images of those who deserve to be immortalised should ever see the light of day. It’s hard to know what Leask, Mr Matalasi, and the Sensible Sentencing Trust really expected the artist and Gallery to do, if anything, and whether things would have stopped at this one image. Arguably, for the Trust, the show was less a problem than opportune—a soapbox. As Rotman knew, it wouldn’t take much digging to find issues connected with other sitters.

The show proceeded unaltered. At the opening, Mob members rubbed shoulders with the art world as the TV news programme Seven Sharp crashed the party to observe and to question the artist. On 6 May 2014, it ran a lengthy piece, essentially estating the Herald-Matalasi view.⁶ In repeatedly showing Harrison’s portrait, they risked a charge of hypocrisy. How could they suggest that it was immoral and hurtful to the Matalasis for the artist to show the photo to hundreds of people in the Gallery when they showed it to hundreds of thousands on TV? And, of course, their attention would only drive more rubberneckers to the Gallery to see for themselves.

Neither the artist nor the Gallery were unsympathetic. As the Herald did report: ‘Mr Langsford said the image of Harrison was taken four years ago—roughly three years before Harrison is accused of murdering Mr Matalasi. The body of work had taken Rotman seven years to compile. “It is just a bloody unfortunate set of circumstances. In the context of the show it is just another image”, Mr Langsford said. “No one would even know who this guy was if you guys [the Herald] hadn’t have grabbed hold of it … We’ve removed that image from our website and taken it off all publicity. And had we known we would have used another image [for publicity], of course.”‘⁷ 

Rotman would soon meet privately with Mr. Matalasi to discuss his concerns. And, though the artist held his ground and wouldn’t remove the offending portrait, the grieving father appreciated the meeting. He described Rotman as ‘one of the best men I have met’. ‘He sticks to his values. He doesn’t compromise his beliefs. I have learnt a lot. Hopefully I will come out a better man.’⁸

Rotman’s show wasn’t exactly documentary. He didn’t require this scale and quality of production simply to convey ‘information’ and his sample of just eight portraits was absurdly small. The images may have been rich in visual information, but, apart from the sitters’ names and chapters, the artist provided no context, compelling us to judge books by their covers. The play between abundant visual detail and zero context lit up the chasm between what photographs alone can tell us and what they can’t. In the absence of a backstory, audience assumptions and prejudices provided the context—indeed, they became the subject.

Rotman has been repeatedly accused of glamourising and glorifying his gang subjects.⁹ However, it is seldom acknowledged that depicting gang members like this is necessarily disorienting, exploiting a fundamental disconnect between subject and treatment, exposing our expectations of both. By picking unlikely subjects for his studio-style portraiture, Rotman prompts us to consider the role photography and portraiture play in generating—not just reflecting—status, worthiness, and entitlement. But he can only weave his spell because many of us still approach portraiture through an assumption, that its purpose is to celebrate valiant persons of substance. That said, his contrarian approach had ample precedents. Take that portrait of the London gangsters, the Kray Brothers, that David Bailey included in his Box of Pin-Ups (1965) alongside shots of more routine celebrities.

On 24 September 2014, Pakai and Harrison were found guilty of murder. Mr Matalasi, a Christian, asked that they be spared imprisonment, saying: ‘I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for your partners, your wives and your kind. The only thing left for me is forgiveness. Shane and Dillin, I have forgiven you.’¹⁰ On 31 October, both were sentenced to life in prison, with minimum non-parole periods: twelve years for Harrison, thirteen for Pakai.

For Rotman’s City Gallery show, the following year, co-curator Aaron Lister and I took the opportunity to expand the selection of works, hoping to complicate the discussion. We added more portraits, including Sean Wellington and Sons (2009). In it, 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 Mob shirts. Many see gangs as abhorrent and see children as innocent, but it’s hard to reconcile these ideas when looking at this picture. It shows that the Mob is a community generations deep—people are born into it. While Rotman’s other portraits are about what has happened, Sean Wellington and Sons is about the future. It prompts us to imagine the lives these boys will live and, thus, also, to imagine the grown-up men in the show as the vulnerable boys they may once have been.

We also added some of Rotman’s photos reproducing the Mob’s own photos, including Denimz’s Collage 3 (2014). Here, Makalio orchestrated a dense arrangement of photos from his own collection—showing himself, fellow gang members, rumbles, prison life, and graves—for Rotman to rephotograph. There are snaps, marked and faded, that look like they’ve been passed down through thick and thin. However, the Collage also includes Rotman images. The Mob’s humble snaps and his slick portraits couldn’t be more at odds, and yet their mutual inclusion suggests a wormhole, linking Rotman’s use of photography with the Mob’s. Who is the artist here? To what extent is the Collage a work by the photographer, to what extent a document of a work by Makalio?

On 13 March 2015, the day before our show opened, we held a mihi whakatau for the Mob. We were nervous. We didn’t know what to expect. That morning, a hundred-or-so guests milled in Civic Square. There were patched members, but also wives, girlfriends, children—it was a family affair. A group arrived in a chartered bus from a Turangi P-rehab centre run by the Notorious chapter and the Salvation Army.¹¹ (They were attending the event as a reward, on completing their programme. After us, they had booked a guided tour at Te Papa.) With uniformed police and Māori wardens on hand to reassure the public, our guests were called into the Gallery with a karanga. As they entered, many recorded the proceedings on phones and camcorders. The work was blessed, words were spoken, people acknowledged, songs sung. At the end, Rotman skyped in from New York.¹² After, as we ate scones and drank tea, girls in school uniform played guitar and sang. The Gallery staff weren’t Leonard Bernstein and Felicia Montealegre feting the Black Panthers, but we knew it could have been spun like that by a wilful journalist, had one snuck in.¹³ 

City Gallery Wellington is a ratepayer-funded museum with a broad audience—including families. Roman’s show was a challenge for us to do. Staff felt vulnerable throughout the process. There were fraught internal discussions, which doubtless mirrored those that members of our audience would have. But, all in all, we got the response we wanted: strong, steady attendance and thoughtful, sober engagement. The media remained surprisingly quiet. And the show brought in audiences we don’t usually see, some coming because they knew the sitters or could relate to them, not because they saw them as ‘Other’.

The show was confronting. Visitors were conflicted—productively so. Reviewing the show for EyeContact, Claire Mabey nailed it beautifully, writing: ‘Jono Rotman’s large-scale portraits of Mongrel Mob members come together as a show that crosses thresholds and exposes profound and uncomfortable distances in our society … Here I am, comfortable in Wellington’s public art gallery, moving from portrait-to-portrait … staring and judging while trying not to judge. Everyone in the room is a stark contrast to the men on the walls. And I’m not uncomfortable assuming they’re all also having some kind of internal tug-of-war: there’s pity that’s provoked, but that reaction is in conflict with the images of power, awe and unapologetic pride in a culture that is so private and unknown to the majority … Rotman’s work … uses photography to distance and de-contextualise. Gang members’ images cross a cultural threshold by being hung in a gallery, their daily lives stripped away so all we have left is the image of a person—their branded selves on show … [the exhibition asks] you to look and look again.’¹⁴

Clearly, Rotman’s photos mean different things to different people, who have different relationships to the subjects and subject matter and different expectations of art and portraiture. To Mr. Matalasi and the Sensible Sentencing Trust they mean one thing, to the Mob members at the mihi whakatau another. The show turned on that difference. It was a social experience. Looking at the photos in New Zealand is different to looking at them overseas.¹⁵ Here, the subjects are our neighbours. They and their friends and families could be standing next to us, interpreting the images in their own way, for their own ends. In the show, we are prompted to consider other people’s relationships to the images and the sitters, and therefore what conditions and specifies our own.

In Auckland, the bad press came from the middle-class white demographic of the Sensible Sentencing Trust, concerned that the show celebrated criminals who were perhaps only incidentally predominantly Māori. Although there was little controversy during the Wellington show, after it closed, two critical posts appeared on Tusk, a blog run by Victoria University museum-studies students. The posts opened up questions about the politics of representation, about inclusion and exclusion—very different questions to those raised in Auckland.

In ‘Being Brown in Your Gallery’, Matariki Williams wrote: ‘I question why gang members were chosen as the subject matter for a photographic series by a Pākehā in the first place. Is this how we as Māori are seen, or to be seen? Is this our enduring image of strength? … Where are other Māori lives? Why are gang members what Rotman decided to focus his project on? … Sure, most Māori would be able to say they have gang members in their whānau but many also have people in their whānau who have PhDs or Masters, are community workers, world-class kapa haka exponents or have represented their country in sport. This exhibition does not show the breadth or diversity of contemporary Māori society, but since it was not made for us, why would it need to?’¹⁶

In posing her questions, Williams made the very problematic equation she implied Rotman was making—identifying his specific subjects with Māori in general. She presumed his project represented Māori as such, rather than gangs generally, the Mongrel Mob specifically, or the sitters as individuals. And certainly, Rotman never aimed to ‘show the breadth or diversity of contemporary Māori society’. It wasn’t even clear whether all his sitters (or which of them) were Māori. That said, the show would not have been as powerful had it featured a predominantly Pākehā gang. A frisson was there because the work caught white middle-class audiences at the crossroads of contradictory concerns over matters of race, class, and gender, scrambling middle-class guilt (over Māori poverty and disenfranchisement) and middle-class outrage (at the Mob’s crime, violence, and attitudes to women).

Characterising City Gallery as a Pākehā institution (‘your gallery’), Williams expanded her concern to institutional structures: ‘Compounding this is the limbo that the [City Gallery’s] Deane Gallery has been in since the departure of [Māori curator] Reuben Friend … Would this exhibition ever have [been] shown had there been a curator in that vacated position?’

It was a rhetorical question. Williams—who is now Curator Mātauranga Māori at Wellington’s Te Papa—implies that a key task for a Māori curator is to block projects that do not affirm ‘our enduring image of strength’. But this surely opens a can of worms, because Rotman’s Mob sitters (who are mostly Māori) would see the project as precisely expressing their ‘enduring image of strength’.

Rotman’s project and Williams’s criticism of it both exemplify the same idea: that marginalised Others have been denied the opportunity to represent themselves and need to exert agency over how they are represented. But the question here is who is being represented by who, and who has the right or responsibility to police that representation? Certainly, the individuals in the portraits agreed to sit for Rotman (they have agency in their personal representation). Perhaps this small sample can stand in for the gang as a whole (certainly Rotman has liaised and continues to liaise with the Mob over how, when, and which works are shown, and they share in the intellectual property; so the Mob has agency, collectively). Should a Māori curator have veto over how or whether these photos see the light of day because, for someone, they may reflect poorly on Māori generally? Is it their job to exclude specific Māori in the name of appropriately including Māori generally? Is this a responsibility such curators have or want?

Williams’s take turned on her assumption that Rotman’s work does not have a Māori audience, that it wasn’t made for Māori. However, this assumption doesn’t reflect our experience in staging the show, which enjoyed strong Māori visitation, as, indeed, one might expect. In a follow-up post, ‘Is Your Gallery Actually Inclusive of Brown Minorities?’, Pākehā writer Claire Adele Baker amplified Williams’s assumption: ‘As Matariki Williams pointed out, the exhibition wasn’t made for a Māori audience … It was Orientalist—it objectified the indigenous “Other”. It was made for the Caucasian majority, like that of the artist and the City Gallery curators, or any other ethnicity that might be discomforted by large portraits of brown gang members.’¹⁷ 

She continued: ‘I think the Gallery could have been even bolder in its curating of the subject matter so as to include a wider audience and potentially reduce, rather than increase, stereotyping of Māori men … In this instance I suggest the Mongrel Mob Portraits could have been exhibited next to/near a parallel exhibition with a related theme to give a wider, more balanced perspective and more context. For example, the Portraits could have been contrasted with an art exhibition showcasing Māori men in a more positive light, or about Pākehā gang members or some other topic contextualising another ethnicity.’

After reading this, I tried to imagine an art museum where curators developed or commissioned shows to balance—to counter or undermine—other shows. What would that look like? A show alternating portraits of gang members with portraits of Phds to a pre-approved ratio, perhaps. And, in what situations would such ‘balancing’ be required? Of course, the irony here is that Rotman was already trying to provide just this sort of corrective, to offset the way gangs are represented elsewhere or not represented at all. He wanted to generate balance, just not the specific balance Tusk sought. Indeed, by addressing ‘deplorables’—who many in the Māori community understandably distance themselves from—Rotman exposed an actual exclusion that underpins the rhetoric of inclusion (what Baker euphemistically calls ‘a more positive light’). The big question remains: by framing his Mob subjects as if they were solid citizens, does Rotman make a mockery of ‘inclusion’ or take it at its word? And, in its critique of Rotman, is Tusk’s overriding concern for inclusion, veracity, or just positivity? How much inclusion and veracity are they prepared to sacrifice?

Rotman’s Mob works mire us in complexity, which is why they can be attacked by opposing camps, by the white middle-class law-and-order lobby (the Sensible Sentencing Trust) and the identity-politics lobby (Tusk). Good work.