Glenn Jowitt's secret societies: notes on two photographs*

Glenn Jowitt, who died at the end of July, loved to discover and document secret societies and secluded worlds. Jowitt is justly famous for the photographs he took during his travels through the tropical Pacific in the 1980s and ‘90s, but I wanted to praise two images that he made very early in his career.

While he was a student at Ilam Art School in the late 1970s, Jowitt became preoccupied with horse racing, and began to travel with his camera to courses around Canterbury. With its elaborate rules, bizarrely named animals,  erudite, laconic tipsters, and conspiratorial trainers and jockeys, the racing industry was and remains a society within New Zealand society.

This portrait of a Canterbury jockey appeared in Jowitt’s first book, Racing Day. With his youth, his pallor, and his dirty face, the jockey might remind us, at first sight, of the chimneysweeps or underage coal miners preserved in nineteenth century daguerreotypes. But where those victims of Victorian commerce offered aimed weary and embarrassed gazes at their pitying photographers, Jowitt’s jockey looks haughtily down at the camera. He is proud of his role in the world Jowitt has entered, and he needs nothing from the photographer or the photographer’s audience. He wears the fresh racetrack mud in the same way that a young man in another culture might wear war paint.

After graduating from Ilam, Jowitt began to photograph another secret society. He spent months drifting across Canterbury with members and associates of Black Power, which had become, by the beginning of the 1980s, New Zealand’s biggest gang. An astonishing series of photographs shows gang members journeying out of Christchurch and into the empty spaces of the Canterbury Plains.

The flat countryside of Canterbury has often posed problems for the Pakeha imagination. Even before the arrival of pyromaniacal European settlers, the Plains had lost their forests to fire. As they looked westward from the tight little colonial town of Christchurch, colonists were troubled by the emptiness that separated them from the Southern Alps. The peaks and glaciers and valleys of the Alps could be safely praised, in Wordsworthian language, for their Sublimity, and happily sketched and painted by weekend excursionists. The formless flatlands, though, were harder to assimilate. Colonial diarists deplored their ‘desolation’.

Driven by psychological and well as economic needs, imperial planners drew straight lines across maps of Canterbury. Crops and stock were raised on rectangular and triangular farm blocks; hedges and gothic churches were planted, as guardians against the tormenting emptiness.

By the time John O’Shea made his road movie Runaway in 1964, Pakeha audiences could consider the Canterbury Plains a cosy, calm place. Taking a stolen car across the lush, flat twilit farms of Canterbury on his way to the Southern Alps, the protagonist of Runaway enters a sort of trance, and believes that he is flying rather than driving his machine. 

But one culture’s paradise can be another’s desert. For their former owners, the Plains had become, by the second half of the twentieth century, an alien landscape. Ancestral rivers had been straightened into drains; lamprey weirs had been replaced by pumphouses; willows had usurped flax bushes; NO TRESPASSING signs frustrated old pathways. For Black Power members habituated to the boozy solidarity of Christchurch’s seedier clubs and pubs, the Plains must have seemed empty and exposed.

This photograph is called Devil and Baldie, after its protagonists. Running out of road, the two gang members have driven across an expanse of grass. Have they stopped deliberately or broken down, at this apparently random spot in the middle of a paddock? The Southern Alps are a line of low hills on the horizon. The sky might have turned grey with age.

Devil seems reluctant to leave the safety of the car. He hunches by one of its open doors, hiding under his Afro. It is left to Baldie, who has been identified by other photographs as a senior member of Black Power in Canterbury, to walk into the emptiness.

Baldie wears a cowboy hat, but he has arrived in this landscape too late: the frontier has been closed, the title deeds have been drawn up, hedges and fences and police stations have been raised, and an outlaw can hope to find neither refuge nor riches.

Jowitt’s jockey exists safely inside his alternate society; Devil and Baldie, by contrast, have been separated from the sanctuaries and rituals of their world, and given to a strange and malicious landscape.

*This post began as yet another attempt to write something for hashtag500words, the website set up last year by the artists and curators Louisa Afoa and Lana Lopesi. As its name suggests, Afoa’s and Lopesi’s site limit its contributors to five hundred words. I’ve now run hopelessly over that word limit three times; as a failed student of the haiku, I should have known that I’d lack the concision that Afoa and Lopesi require. Take a look at hashtag500words anyway.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]