More than the houses themselves, Ussher is fascinated with the human urge to collect and curate the objects that are in them. "Put me in a room ... and I don’t see the architecture," she says. "I’ll be drawn to the corner with a pile of things."
About a decade-and-a-half ago, after 30 years as a photographer of people for the New Zealand Listener, Jane Ussher developed a new focus for her practice. She had just left the magazine, which she had joined as staff photographer in 1977, straight out of the photography course at Wellington Polytechnic, when she had a chance meeting with Helen Clark.
The then prime minister had recently been in the Antarctic and had fallen under the spell of the South Pole.
"She talked about going into Robert Falcon Scott’s hut, and got very choked up about it," Ussher recalls.
The photographer seized the moment. "I think you need to send me down there immediately," Ussher told Clark. Eighteen months later, over the summer of 2008–09, Ussher was in the Antarctic, taking photographs of the huts built by Scott and Ernest Shackleton on their early 20th century polar expeditions.
She determined to treat the photography of interiors as she had treated the photography of people. That is, as portraiture, but expressed not explicitly, as personal representation, but suggestively, as personalised space.
The hundreds of people Ussher photographed, over several decades, may have been surprised to learn that any unease they felt was shared by their photographer.
"I would walk into a portrait session with huge anxiety," Ussher says. "There are so many things I can’t control."
That was one reason why shooting the interiors of historic Antarctic huts was such a liberating experience. With people — the moving parts — out of the picture, the stress of a shoot subsided and Ussher could really take her time. "I’ll spend hours behind the camera in a room," she says. "And when I say hours, I mean hours."
There were reasons of craft, too, behind Ussher’s career shift. Photographing interiors, she says, "plays to my strengths, and the strengths of my camera".
Using a large-format megapixel digital camera, supported on a tripod and set to a two- to three-second exposure, allows her to focus on "the details, and the details within details" that arrest her attention when she enters a room.
A figure appearing in shot at this level of exposure would be a blurred and transgressive presence among the objects, fittings and furniture that make up what Ussher calls the "tapestry" of her room portraits.
Since Ussher’s initial essay in still life, she has gone on to shoot scores of inside spaces around Aotearoa New Zealand. She has found her subject matter in a wide variety of residential settings — big and small homes, heritage houses, converted churches and apartments. What unites the disparate interiors she portrays is the effort that has been expended in creating domestic environments that express the sensibility of their inhabitants.
Of course, another sensibility is also realised in Ussher’s images of interiors: that of the photographer herself. Ussher’s enthusiasm for photographing interior spaces became entwined with her interest in the practice of collecting.
There’s a fidgety aspect to the management of cultivated interiors; collections are invariably added to and their display is frequently adjusted. This flux justifies some creative photographic licence. Ussher doesn’t bring items to dress a room, but she will move things around — with permission, she stresses — if she thinks a bit of relocation will improve a shot. There is a nice irony in the thought of a photographer so resistant to image interference shifting pieces of furniture from positions to which they have been assigned with millimetric precision.
Ussher is impressed by the prevalence and depth of the collecting impulse.
"I think New Zealand is full of individuals who go off on tangents and fill their houses with extraordinary things," she says. "Once they become interested in something, they can’t stop themselves. And, of course, I love it. I was brought up a Dunedin Presbyterian, and in every house I’ve ever lived in, the rooms have been painted white."
Perhaps it takes a minimalist to fully appreciate maximalism: "When I go into these rooms, I become completely enamoured of them," she says. "I don’t need to do the collecting. I can just appreciate it in other people’s houses."
Ussher distances herself from the suggestion that her photography should be defined, and capitalised, as "Art". She has the professional photographer’s reticence about intruding on artistic territory or assuming artist status.
Ussher composes images. She doesn’t manipulate them; she doesn’t do abstraction or hyperrealism or ironic homage. Her interiors portraiture invites speculative interpretation, but is not overtly provocative; she does not set out to shock or unsettle. Her ambition is simpler and she is not afraid to seem ingenuous when stating it: "I have a passion for creating images that I think are beautiful."
