In a world exhaustively google-mapped, surveyed, and charted, there are left, seemingly, few frontiers between worlds known and unknown. These photographs explore the liminal spaces of the remote village of Jerusalem/Hiruharama on the Whanganui River, New Zealand. Here indigenous Maori spirituality sits comfortably along aside the Catholic religion of the colonists. Here the traditions that mediate people and nature have never been broken - deriving their spirit and identity the river, the Maori people of the Whanganui maintain, ‘Ko au te awa. Ko te awa ko au' (I am the river. The river is me). No map can convey the significance of this terrain. Having lived for a year in Jerusalem/Hiruharama to make the film ‘How Far is Heaven’, we (my wife and I) eagerly return as often as possible, on pilgrimage, back to the place and to the people who have become so dear to us - and indeed, for this still-evolving series of photographs, pilgrimage is one of the work’s central themes. Of particular interest is the “transformative consequence of pilgrimage”, which, as Robert Macfarlane tells us “...turns the mind back upon itself, leaving the traveler both ostensibly unchanged and profoundly redirected.”

Our guide and subject in this series of pictures is Terence (who was aged 4 at the time we were filming - he’s now 13 and in that ‘liminal’ state of adolescence). Together we ‘roam’ the village, most often in an attentive, amiable silence - from the church to the swing bridge, from the ‘metal pit’ to the ‘Top House’ - it’s a well worn path, a journey made daily. However, the more you become acquainted with this place the more mysterious it becomes.

Poet John Dennison, in his essay ‘Visible & Invisible: Four Contemplations’ - a response to these submitted photographs, writes «… Also central to Chris’s work is a concern with the way in which a sense of profound connection to the land is made difficult by the impact of colonisation, opening up for Pakeha [European descendants] —as largely the beneficiaries of colonisation—an ambiguous groundlessness. Another recurrent concern is his fascination with the tensions of late modernity; to adopt philosopher Charles Taylor’s construal, is the ‘frame’ of reality open or closed? Is reality only material, is it more truly spiritual (where reality may be an illusion), or is it the world visible and invisible? With regard to both these concerns, photography has perhaps a useful pertinence, dealing directly and playfully with the ambiguities between the documentary and the acutely personal. It’s a helpfully unstable medium for the question ‘where is here?’ It’s frame is redolent with the tensions Taylor charts in A Secular Age… … Let us say the problem is one of seeing.»

John Dennison essay can be read in full on the PhotoForum (New Zealand) website here.