At last you yielded up the album, which
Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages
Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!
Too much confectionery, too rich……

from ‘Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album’, Philip Larkin, 1955



The Art Box at Vinnies Restaurant is currently home to this installation by Deborah Smith. Many of you will remember her as the photographer producing beautiful images for Scotties for many years, those of you new to her work can explore our main site for a taste of her style.

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION:

“Years ago I was invited to a young woman’s 18th birthday dinner at Vinnies restaurant. The young woman was Pieta Brenton and I have been photographing her now since she was eleven. Vinnies is a loaded site for her, a place she frequented as a child and adolescent with her parents and siblings. I made a note on the back of my cheque book that night-slingbacks and sticking plasters. The young women, swan-like and extraordinary but not able to glide in their newly acquired precipitous heels. Her heels, those hard earned baby blue patent leather Louis Vuittons purchased in Paris, seemed so emblematic.

Time hurtles on, the Louis’s are now tired, characters have fallen out of the boat and the family no longer lives in the neighbourhood. Photography gets this kind of melancholy.

Someone asked me if Pieta was my muse and I wasn’t sure…. more a protagonist I think. From the dressing up of a child to the acting out of a teenager- to a knowing wink from a young woman. I have always loved the film still with all its promise from a fragment. Can a girl stand in for a life, or even a world? I wonder about site as a repository for memory and to use more of Philip Larkin’s lines ‘this is a real girl in a real place’ but it’s ‘a past that no one now can share’."

Deborah Smith

SOMETHING ABOUT A GIRL runs until October 25th at Vinnies Restaurant, 166 Jervois Rd, Herne Bay, Auckland, New Zealand….

UPDATE: Deborah will be joining John Reynolds and Mark Smith for the 3 X 3 exhibition at Havelock North’s Black Barn Gallery from November 21st.