Patricia (Patsy) Dunn's photography

 

Patsy Dunn's interest in photography went back to her childhood in Beaumaris. Her uncle Leigh Cuffley was a professional photographer with a studio near her house. She was very friendly with his daughters, Jill, Nanette and Sharon and was a frequent visitor to their home where she saw examples of his work. Early portrait photographs of her dressed in the costume of a Dutch Girl have survived. These photographs were of a high technical standard and developed her critical sense of photography as an art form. She learned about lighting, about composition and the need to find interesting angles to lift her photographs above the commonplace. Later, as an art teacher, she sometimes taught photography and learnt to process and print black and white film.

 

However, her main work began once she moved to 18 Bracken Avenue, Epsom, in 1973. At that time smaller format cameras were replacing the single lens reflex cameras she had used early on. The introduction of 35mm colour film also made a difference to what she could achieve. Photographers like Theo Schoon had moved quickly into the use of colour film in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She had seen Schoon at work and learnt the need to concentrate on the image, the end result, rather than technical difficulty. All her early main body of garden photographs that relate to her botanical art was shot on 35 mm colour film and professionally processed. Nearly all her early garden photographs were shot with Olympus cameras, especially the OM10. She preferred to take hand held shots and use natural lighting. She mainly used Kodak film with a fine grain, measuring the exposures with a Weston light meter. Because she had a steady hand and a fine sense of how to use light and shadow to advantage her images often have a striking effect. Gradually, as the garden developed, it became her source of inspiration providing her with a seemingly endless range of effects as the seasons changed. Ultimately the total body of the works grew to the extent that they become a portfolio that needs to be seen as a whole as well as by single images.

 

Her garden photographs include general shots of both the front and back areas and cover both the flower and vegetable plantings. But the greatest focus of her photography was on the two magnolia trees she had planted and watch grow. Of these the Magnolia Campbellii was in the front garden near the gate, while the Rustica Rubra was in the back garden centrally placed behind the bird bath. She began photographing these as they flowered and took shots of single flowers and of the whole trees as the flowering proliferated. Individually and collectively these constitute a varied and striking range of images. She also was interested in the trunks and branches of the magnolias, the patterns they made and the textural effects of lichen. The camellia bushes she planted around the garden also provided her with an extensive number of shots, some focussing on the flowers close up, others showing the whole bush. The leaves themselves also attracted her attention as an important part of the subject matter. She would use ladders to gain high vantage points and, once the upstairs was built, would shoot some of her photographs from the upstairs windows. Taken together the photographs give a complete picture of the flowering magnolias and camellias seen in detail, close up, and as a whole from a distance. In 2007, with the acquisition of a Sanyo digital camera capable of both video and still photography, she enlarged the number of shots she took and included video clips as well as stills. The lightness and flexibility of the camera and its comparatively large screen gave her the freedom to work more quickly, as the opportunity arose, and to be more improvised in her working method.

 

In her drawings and paintings she used photographs she had taken to help make her pictures but did not copy them. In fact, she also made studies from the actual flowers, leaves and branches to augment the information supplied in the photographs. Often she would place a flower in a vase in her upstairs studio and make a series of studies from it. The analysis of the subject was important to her, as was an understanding of its form and growth. Thus the photographs supplemented the paintings but ranged more widely than them in scope and effects. Ultimately they must be seen as equal if not more important than the drawings and paintings. Certainly there are many more of them and the time taken to capture them was also much more extensive. Through them she was able to trace the progression of the seasonal flowering that had such a magnetic attraction for her. The flowers with their botanical interest was central to her photography as to her art, but not exclusive. They are not simply garden photographs but rather a personal record of her love of the subject matter which came from her garden and had been created by her hands and mind. Her serial approach to the magnolia photographs concerns itself with the variations and individuality of each flower at each stage of its development and decline. She was well aware of the brevity of the life and beauty of a flower and saw in it a comment on her own mortality. She chose these lines from Scripture as her epitaph:

'I have faded like a flower

 I have withered like grass in the fields.'

However, her artwork will ensure an ongoing interest in her passion for life and beauty.

 

Michael Dunn

Auckland 2014