Conor Clarke (Ngāi Tahu, Scottish, Welsh) and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi)

12 April–2 August 2025

National Library Gallery, Ground floor
Corner Molesworth & Aitken St, Wellington

Presented by City Gallery Wellington as part of Focus on Photography

Bridget Reweti *Ōtāne 1*, 2021, stereoscopic photograph

Contemporary Māori photographic artists Conor Clarke (Ngāi Tahu, Scottish, Welsh) and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi) consider the idea of ‘landscape’ and offer Māori ways of seeing site.

Picturing place through photography.
Since its inception, photography has played a pivotal role in shaping the ways that we picture place. Landscape photography, in particular, helped to construct early settler-colonial imaginings of ‘New Zealand,’ utilising newly invented technologies to frame and disseminate idealised landscape views.

Site Seeing brings together the work of contemporary Māori photographic artists Conor Clarke (Ngāi Tahu, Scottish, Welsh) and Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui, Ngāi Te Rangi), to consider these introduced modes of picturing the land around us.

Reconsidering the ways we see land.
Site Seeing draws our attention to the artifice of the notion of ‘landscape,’ making apparent the ways it has been constructed through physical, photographic, and digital means. It offers, instead, Māori ways of seeing site.

Through their ongoing exploration of the photographic medium, Clarke and Reweti interrogate historical tropes and technologies, drawing attention to the role the colonial gaze has played in shaping non-indigenous human relationships to place.

By turning their lens to familiar sites — such as Ka Whatu Tu o Rakihouia the Kaikōura Ranges and the lakes of Te Rua o te Moko Fiordland — Clarke and Reweti encourage us to reconsider the ways we see the land and the ways we imagine our relationship to it.

This exhibition is part of Focus on Photography, a collaboration between the National Library, City Gallery Wellington, and Adam Art Gallery, which celebrates historic and contemporary photography in Aotearoa. Through a series of exhibitions and events, it highlights the medium’s ability to document, reflect, and transform the way we see the world.