NZ visual diary - entry 74
cornerbar - city centre
I will date & place myself by making a reference to Dick Clark's American Bandstand. For an adolescent fella who wanted to hear the latest rock & roll singles and learn (or not) the steps to the latest dance floor craze, American Band served as my tv tutorial.
The script never varied . . . after a record was played, Dick asked a dance floor couple what they thought of the recording. There was a stock answer to the question: "It had a good beat."
And so it is for me with colour, as opposed to black and white, photography. It's easy, often too easy, to produce a photograph that has lots of rich colour and then to admire the image because it has, as it were, a good beat . . . often the truth . . . always too simplistic.
I could not resist the colour magnet in the image rendered here, although I walked past the cornerbar for more than a year before I set myself to photographing it. Beyond the inclusion of colour to create visual connection ('It has a good beat'), I wanted the photograph to convey some questions I asked myself as I waited for the right moment to press my camera shutter, specifically when a couple entered the frame of the photograph from its right side.
By the particular way in which I rendered light and shadow in the image, I attempted to pose a few questions:
The coloured glass panels above the bar's window bays are distinctive and attractive: Have these or other patrons of the bar paused between swigs of beer to considered the beauty of the coloured glass?
Are the seated people in the photograph regular patrons of the cornerbar - the 'Cheers' crowd of the American television sitcom - or are they transients? My image plays with one answer: they are the shadowy presence of a one-off crowd.
What is the history of this corner's architecture? The corner is home to the elegant Hotel DeBrett, a boutique hotel on High Street at its intersection with Shortland Street. Was the bar's current aesthetics a consequence of the hotel's extensive renovation some years ago?
Will the building itself, with its modest but pleasant beauty, endure over time, or in taking this photograph am I unwittingly preserving an ephemeral moment in the architectural allure of this street corner?