INTRODUCTION
In this age where photographs quickly disappear into the oblivion of an imagesaturated world, Laurence Aberhart’s photographs quietly endure. Peering through the window into the worlds he records is a process of discovery. With their extraordinary depth of field bringing sharp focus to even the smallest details, they reward slow and intent looking. Writing about Cartier Bresson, John Berger paraphrased him as saying that what counts in a photograph is plenitude and simplicity. In Aberhart’s photography, we encounter this often. The slow pace of looking at his prints is mirrored by the slow process of taking the photograph. Since he began photographing in the 1970s, Aberhart has used only the one camera. Despite
its being cumbersome to use – the whole apparatus weighing 20kg – and requiring papers and film not easy to obtain, he continues to shoot with a century-old, Korona 8” x 10” view camera. Choosing the right conditions, setting up the camera and tripod, framing the shot, loading the film under a black hood and then waiting for the exposure (in the case of his Mt Taranaki photograph in “The Prisoner’s Dream”, five hours) takes a considerable length of time. So too, the process of developing the prints. Eschewing an enlarger, Aberhart makes contact prints and tones them in a gold and/or selenium bath. While he was able to obtain it, he used printing out paper which developed in daylight with exposures between two and six hours. The qualities of exceptional luminosity