Richard Wotton: A Selective Eye, Photographs 1975-2025 / 13 December 2025 – 3 May 2026
Category
Current Exhibitions
Richard Wotton ‘Walls and Fences #1, Cooks Gardens Entrance, St Hill Street, Wanganui 1982’
Richard Wotton
A Selective Eye: Photographs 1975-2025
This exhibition celebrates the work of photographer Richard Wotton, whose interest in the medium began in the mid-1970s. Like many of his peers, the 1975/76 exhibition The Active Eye, staged by the Manawatu Art Gallery, helped bring photography to the attention of the public as a legitimate medium within the realm of the visual arts. This exhibition presented what may have been considered mundane or everyday, bringing it into new focus with altered perspectives on the world.
Half a century later, Wotton’s own interest in the world around him – and, more importantly, the city of Whanganui – has resulted in a collection of images that attest to a photographer with a highly selective eye. Traversing a terrain of subject matter from portraiture, interior and exterior architectural views to studies in colour and form, Wotton’s engagement with the medium is something he has fallen in and out of love with over the course of his life. However, each time he has returned after a hiatus of not having a camera to hand, his focus has seemingly changed frequency to another channel.
His ongoing interest in architecture, now spanning five decades, has created a body of images that are refined studies in composition, light, memory and, often, nostalgia, encompassing both New Zealand and overseas subjects. Wotton’s attention has not been drawn to grand structures but more to vernacular architecture – houses and buildings that would often be overlooked or unseen. He has a special ability to capture these spaces in an uncanny suspended animation, where human presence is implied: an empty smoko room, a theatre, a restaurant – you can almost hear the conversations, the small talk, the gossip.
Whanganui has been fortunate to have had a lineage of photographers to document the city, its architecture, interiors and people. These have included William Harding (1826-1899), Frank Denton (1869-1963), and Mark Lampe (1884-1972) of Tesla Studios. Since the inception of the Sarjeant Gallery’s artist-in-residence programme at Tylee Cottage, both the inaugural recipient, Laurence Aberhart, in 1986, and Andrew Ross, in 2009, each created a body of work that documented this place, but it has been Wotton whose selective eye has been a constant.
The exhibition contains images that could be found anywhere in New Zealand, but the fact that so many of these sites are places that will strike a chord with locals is a special thing and a wonderful legacy that Wotton has created. From fish ‘n’ chips restaurants such as the Black Cat and George’s to the soon-to-be demolished architectural carbuncle that is the much-loved Liffiton Castle, these images act like index cards to another time. In sharp contrast to when Wotton first picked up his camera, today everyone is a photographer, but what he reminds us of is that within the world’s image soup, his selective eye and his rapport with his subjects is unique, and something to be celebrated.
Greg Donson
Curator