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MASSEY is published by Massey University, Private Bag 11-222, Palmerston North, New Zealand

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MASSEY has a circulation of 75,000.

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Anne Noble: States of Grace

Justin Paton (editor), Anne Kennedy, Lydia Wevers

To look through the pages of States of Grace is to immerse oneself in the world as photographer Anne Noble journeys through it –  looking, noticing, watching, absorbing, being part of, reflecting on and quietly celebrating as she goes.

Since 1982, Noble has been making photographic essays, which are documentaries, histories, observations and personal narrations. She has made studies exploring the places and people that make up the landscape in all its definitions as she has encountered it.

The book is a survey of Noble’s work over these two decades, a collection of beautifully reproduced photographs, published in accompaniment to her exhibition of the same title, at Dunedin Public Art Gallery and the City Gallery, Wellington earlier this year.

Eloquent essays by Justin Paton and Lydia Wevers reflect on some of the themes of the work, while Anne Kennedy considers Noble’s work through poetic prose.

Justin Paton writes that Noble’s photographs are “not something ‘taken’ by the artist, but gifted to her by her subjects”. Without Noble’s perception, however, these moments would go unseen.

Documenting is too dry an expression for Noble’s process of following her subject; these images tell of a closeness and familiarity with the photographed. She has patiently spent time with her subjects and as such can uncover huge pleasures and insights into lives that we might otherwise overlook.

The Wanganui and The Whanganui Revisited series chart the course of the Whanganui River without reducing the landscape to a series of vistas across the river and mountains. Revealed is the intimacy of a relationship that Noble has with the place. She unleashes the power and beauty of a landscape that she clearly loves and which she insists should be shared.

The remarkable images of In My Father’s Garden that follow her father’s death are especially tender, without sentimentality. Likewise, there is nothing sweet about the Hidden Lives essays, photographs of elderly intellectually disabled people and their carers. Rather, they often show a sneakily-comic warmth.

Time seems unimportant – neither to the images, the photographer or the photographed, no matter whether the subject is New Zealand landscapes, the nuns at the Tyburn convent in London or Noble’s daughter, Ruby, with a mouthful of violently-coloured sweets. And so these images demand that the reader take time too. These are not images to be flicked through, they require the attention and the respect that Noble has given in making them.

The book offers a beautifully indulgent opportunity to lose yourself in the physical and human landscapes of Anne Noble’s photo essays any time you choose.

Rachel Chapman