Caryline Boreham: Royal Tour
February 28, 2017 - April 9, 2017
Photography Gallery
Caryline Boreham, Queen Elizabeth II – Ranfurly Veterans Home, Auckland (2010), Framed Digital Inkjet Print
Caryline Boreham’s photographs invite us to explore society’s hidden spaces, abundant in underlying cultural information. Her chosen subjects are often institutional interiors which are inaccessible to the general public and are thus foreign to our view, yet strangely familiar in their set-up. Boreham’s photographs are carefully designed, balanced and symmetrical. Their aesthetic composition invites us to not only consider the unspoken laws and procedures taking place in these spaces, their intended function, but also to explore their – unexpected – beauty and visual appeal.
With the series of photographs taken for Royal Tour, Boreham invites us to reflect on New Zealand’s political history as part of the British Royalty, and what role the monarch still plays in our society today. By documenting the seemingly out-of-place positioning of royal portraits, we are taken on a royal tour of a different kind.
“Part of the cultural baggage colonists brought to New Zealand was a honed sense of the British class system, at the head of which was the monarch, but over the past century and a half a greater sense of social egalitarianism has prevailed in this country – even if, since the ‘80s, there has been a parallel growth of distinctions based on wealth rather than birth, differences equally obnoxious and possibly more socially destructive.
The present Queen’s unique reign has seen the steady erosion of the almost mystical quality surrounding the sovereign and New Zealand’s slow, but inevitable drift towards becoming a republic will involve discussion as to what kind of head of state will replace the present monarchical arrangement.
The impression these accumulated photographs give is these royal portraits, despite their generally significant locations and important positions, have the feel of flotsam and jetsam washed up on the shores of our history. The documentary tradition of picturing sites unpeopled only reinforces this impression of irrelevance, and even where human figures are present, no one is taking any notice of the portraits. The constitutional back-stop they represent seems to have relegated them to the back-water of our consciousness.
As this country moves irrevocably towards republican status, these grand images of those Royal Highnesses seem increasingly stranded on their walls, between the floor of our European heritage and the ceiling of our colonial past. Boreham’s seemingly dead-pan documentary project takes us on a thoughtful and pertinent royal tour.”
(Peter Ireland, Long To Reign Over Us, 2016)