Plain Sight
Sara McIntyre, Gospel Hall, 2026
When Baudelaire defined the flâneur in 1863, he could hardly have imagined a district nurse in Aotearoa a century and a half later: a woman in her sixties driving the remote routes of her childhood holidays through Te Rohe Pōtae, the King Country, stopping often to take photographs on her iPhone. Yet it was on these journeys—travelling to attend patients in far-flung locations—that Sara McIntyre began to make sense of a life spent nursing and photographing. As a consequence, shortly before reaching the official age of retirement, her first solo exhibition, Observations of a Rural Nurse, opened in 2016. Soon after, she began work on a book of the same title, published by Massey University Press in 2020.
Plain Sight invites contemplation of McIntyre’s ‘nurse’s eye view’ through a small catalogue of subjects, places, light conditions, and approaches to image-making that have occupied her in recent years. In 2025, McIntyre spent time in Kākanui, near Oamaru, as the inaugural artist in residence at the Forrester Art Gallery. Photographs made during her stay in Te Rohe o Waitaki appear alongside those from Te Tairāwhiti, Rangitīkei, and her Te Rohe Pōtae home. McIntyre’s village of Kākahi may be her equivalent of Paris’s Place Saint-Sulpice, which Georges Perec attempted to exhaustively document in 1974.
In contrast to the more conventionally detached flâneur, McIntyre is embedded in the communities she photographs. Her attentiveness is shaped by care and long acquaintance. People appear relatively rarely, yet it is networks that consistently grant her access to subjects. During her extended stay in Kākanui, it was fellow artists she gravitated to. McIntyre admits to having photographed “every bit” of painter Kim Pieters’ church and garden. “Sometimes she would follow me to see what the hell I was photographing this time.” The exhibition includes an uncharacteristically formal portrait of Pieters, positioned on the doorstep of her Herbert home—no doubt inspired by the chromatic affinity of “Crocs, door, downpipe.” Whether Pieters in her Crocs or the photograph of her clothesline offers the more telling portrait remains an open question.
McIntyre is every bit a “botanist of the asphalt,” as Walter Benjamin memorably described the flâneur in 1928—albeit one irretrievably detained by the gravel roads of the King Country. Her photographs dwell in the familiar, what she calls the “mundane under your nose.” A subject to which she repeatedly returns—and perhaps her most distinctive variant on Perec’s ‘infra-ordinary’—is her attention to the work of ‘makers unknown’: the quiet care of gardeners, mural painters, and clothesline arrangers.
Sara McIntyre, born in 1951, is a photographer based in Te Rohe Pōtae King Country. She was nine when her family first arrived at Kākahi for a summer holiday in 1960. Fifty years on, she returned to live there permanently. Working as a district nurse she began her photographic exploration of Kākahi and surrounding towns. In 2016 her first solo exhibition, Observations of a Rural Nurse, was held at Anna Miles Gallery. In 2020 her book of the same title, designed by Sarah Gladwell, was published by Massey University Press. In 2020 Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery presented Sara McIntyre – Observations of a Rural Nurse. In 2021, the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata presented Kākahi: Peter and Sara McIntyre. In 2025, McIntyre was inaugural artist in residence at The Forrester Gallery, Oamaru, where her exhibition, Kākahi to Kakanui was presented. Her photographs are now held in the collections of Te Papa Tongarewa, Te Whare o Rehua Sarjeant Gallery and private collections across Aotearoa and Australia.