Thomas Lord

Summer Circuit

Featured Portfolio, March 2021

Essay by Edward Hanfling for PhotoForum

The first few photos in Thomas Lord’s Summer Circuit photographic series are coloured by a peculiar purplish light. Many New Zealanders will recall the ominous (some said “apocalyptic”) haze from the Australian bush fires that accompanied the dawn of the new year 2020 – a “shepherd’s warning” if ever there was one. In Summer Circuit, these dark clouds descend on the sport and industry of horse racing, which has in fact been in decline for many years. Lord shows us the back of the grandstand at the Waikouaiti Racecourse, all gaping black windows and grimy concrete, a monstrous monument to the past. Once, racing was considered one of the three Rs that spelled out the essence of New Zealand culture. The other two, Rugby and BeeR, have maintained, or indeed expanded, their constituencies; the former, by embracing professionalism and turning itself into a more palatable form of entertainment than the dour thuggery of past eras; the latter, by concocting all manner of poncey tipples that would have been as unfamiliar as pearls to those who frequented the Six O’Clock Swill (I am supping an “Apricot Sour” as I write this). Racing, however, does not appear to have evolved significantly since the 1960s. As New Zealand has become a more diverse society, so the punters have dwindled to the dregs of an aged mainstream. Lord could probably have lobbed a withering, side-splitting grenade at such recalcitrant relics, and it is true that some of his photos are quite funny. But there is more to it than that.

Lord, though not a devotee of the sport, has been an employee of the racing industry over the past few summers, travelling around the racecourses of small towns throughout Otago and Southland, shooting television footage of the races. Only during his final summer on the job did this photographic “work” turn into “art”, when, in between moments of action and routine tasks, he would take up his 6x7 medium format camera and, wielding it without a tripod, forge the images that became Summer Circuit. To some extent, then, these pictures are spontaneous responses to a moment, an incident or event, a scene or an encounter, not always perfectly controlled or calculated. Clearly, too, they show anything but the races themselves (sack races notwithstanding). Yet the time Lord spent immersed in the industry – method acting, as it were – has worked its way into the photos. The pictures are also products of astute observation, of rumination and reflection – the irregular perks of a job that affords plenty of time for watching not very much happening. Lord has gotten to know something about the people and the places. He gives us collared shirts and short dresses; meandering wires, ancient phones and utilitarian furniture; inflexible numbers and sloppy signs to make McCahon or Frizzell lick their lips. Also, he shows some of it from his place of work, perched high in a box or up the back of a grandstand, looking down on proceedings. This in itself can make things appear comical, not least two race-clad jockeys traipsing past their numbers, whips in hand – they put me in mind of the critic John Ruskin’s description of soldiers in a painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema as “like a small detachment of black beetles in search of a dead rat”. One photo shows the race judge, up in the box, gaze firmly fixed on the “Sport & Racing” section of the newspaper, which carries news of New Zealand’s annihilation by Australia in test cricket. The whole image is on a tilt, as if the world is slipping off its axis, or at least as if the racing industry has been given the heave ho.

 While Lord plied his trade on Otago’s summer circuit, the government of the day, specifically the Foreign Affairs and Racing Minister Winston Peters, designed and ultimately implemented the Racing Reforms Act, in an effort to rescue the sport from its lingering crisis. In 2018, a review of the industry, commissioned from Australian expert John Messara, suggested subsuming the New Zealand TAB into an international corporation and closing a number of smaller racecourses, including some of those featured in Summer Circuit. Fears of an Australian takeover spread, reflected, perhaps, in those opening images in Lord’s series of the smoke billowing in from across the Tasman, and in the closing image of a faded photograph of Phar Lap, the champion New Zealand racehorse the Aussies always try to claim as their own. Hung skewwhiff against fake wood panelling, a crack in the frame fixed with she’ll-be-right-mate sticky tape, this wretched specimen might lead one back to the suspicion that Lord is putting the boot into an adversary who is already out for the count. To repeat: there is more to it.

For one thing, photos are pictures, and pictures are both more than what we see in them (they have form, not just subject matter) and less (whatever we impute to them exceeds the form they actually have, and says more about us than the pictures themselves). For another thing – well, here I might seem to digress. In 2007, the Suter Art Gallery Te Aratoi o Whakatū held an exhibition called Pākehā Now! The curator was Anna-Marie White (Te Ātiawa), who also wrote a brilliant catalogue essay, “Te Pākehā: The People of New Zealand”, in an affected ethnographic style. “Pākehā families usually live separately from their extended families”, White sententiously observes. “When Pākehā become old, they are sent to live in a ‘rest home’. This is a special complex where workers take care of elderly Pākehā until they die.” Funnily enough, White does not refer to the place of horseracing in Pākehā culture. And what Lord is observing, deep in the white hills of Central Otago and Southland, is a largely white phenomenon (and one that seems to be merely waiting to die). He is conscious of being Pākehā himself, and of owning up, as it were, to being involved in the milieu that confronts his gaze, and that he surveys from on high. In the final particularly bucolic looking image, purple-flowering pasture weeds, windblown pines and a steel pylon with a corrugated iron-clad viewing box together maintain a stubborn alien presence on the land.

Edward Hanfling is a lecturer in art history and theory at the Dunedin School of Art. He is a regular contributor to the quarterly journal Art New Zealand, and his publications include the book ‘Pictures They Want to Make: Recent Auckland Photography’, co-written with Chris Corson-Scott and published by PhotoForum in 2013.

Thomas Lord is a technical teacher in the photography studio at the Dunedin School of Art. As well as photography, Thomas has held exhibitions in painting where nostalgia, ecology and the concept of home forms a common thread between the two media.

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