"There were no industries, there was no construction; the town’s one asset was its climate. If you were young and wanted excitement and had a living to make, why, the town wouldn’t want you and you wouldn’t want it. If you were old and had a small income or pension, you couldn’t have found a more attractive place to live (or die) in.” Jim Thompson
Now and on Earth borrow’s its title from the novel of the same name by the noted American noir author Jim Thompson. Thompson’s fiction inhabits a place at the edge of society. His is a world of marginal circumstances, a terrain that is forever on the outskirts of town, down at heel and just making do. The landscape is compromised and abandoned by mainstream society, a place where permanence and impermanence are in a constant tussle for dominance.
My photographic practice is concerned with the examination of zones of interaction - those places where one environment gives over to another and the inevitable tensions and contradictions of such environments. While such a focus has inevitable ethnographic and documentary overtones, my examination is concerned with transitions that are both visible (for example, land border) or more often, psychological and emotional borders. These are places where order gives way to disorder or where the orderly and polite suddenly have no claim or place or space to inhabit. More often than not, such environments comprise little drama; rather, they are often utilitarian, almost banal places that society does not give a second glance.
The series was shot in the Bay of Plenty in the north island of New Zealand, close to the village of Pukehina.