Made in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as Kathryn McCool neared the end of her teenage years, this exquisite series of photographs of people and places, was captured on black-and-white film with a Rolleiflex camera.
With little photographic experience, McCool set out to photograph her community, friends and family. The result is a set of unguarded, simple and eerie images. With the passing of time ‘P.North’ has become an engaging, poignant and sometimes humorous document of a photographer at the very start of her journey.
—
Exhibited at CCP for the first time in its entirety ‘P.North’ doesn’t refer to a place, but rather to a dreamlike and dislocated moment in time. McCool’s work shows shopkeepers, youths, churchgoers, young children and animals populating the nondescript landscapes of sleepy small towns amidst strangely loaded backdrops.
More a poetic essay than social documentary ‘P.North’ was produced in the context of the neo-liberal restructuring of the New Zealand economy, and its devastating impact on the rural and working classes. A young McCool, aware of a country and a way of life undergoing drastic change, was driven to create a segue, an imagined borderland made up of her rich, peculiar and subjective imaginings. At the same time this period was one of her own transition from childhood to adulthood, and a visual reckoning with her own small corner of the world, and what might lie beyond.
After making these images, McCool did not make photographs for many years. Included in this exhibition, alongside the full suite of ‘P.North, also features new work, as McCool has recently taken up her Rolleiflex camera and is once again photographing her community.
—
Kathryn McCool is a New-Zealand-born photographer who has lived and worked in Australia since 1994.
