Seeing
Artist and role
Peryer, Peter (New Zealand, b.1941, d.2018), Artist
Date
1989
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About this work
The career of Peter Peryer is a rebuke to the idea that photography is an art of quick visual hits. Peryer scrutinises simple things and objects – sea foam, a toy truck, cakes arranged on a tray – but so calmly and intensely that scales shift, surfaces buckle and the things become strange to themselves.
Here the dots on a page of Braille are rendered as vast and mysterious as hieroglyphs on an ancient stone wall. Peryer seems to be running his gaze over this page, grain by grain, millimetre by millimetre, feeling for the message encoded in its surface. For viewers who cannot read Braille this picture’s message lies out of reach, beyond hearing. At the same time, however, its finely graded textures and peppery light offer a reading lesson of another kind – one for the eyes rather than the fingertips.
By pressing his lens so close that the page engulfs our field of view, Peryer invites us to slow down and trace the grain of the world with uncannily close attention. Perhaps this is one reason for his choice to photograph a page of Braille. He wants viewers, like the man cured of blindness in the famous biblical story, to see the things he photographs as if for the first time.
Here the dots on a page of Braille are rendered as vast and mysterious as hieroglyphs on an ancient stone wall. Peryer seems to be running his gaze over this page, grain by grain, millimetre by millimetre, feeling for the message encoded in its surface. For viewers who cannot read Braille this picture’s message lies out of reach, beyond hearing. At the same time, however, its finely graded textures and peppery light offer a reading lesson of another kind – one for the eyes rather than the fingertips.
By pressing his lens so close that the page engulfs our field of view, Peryer invites us to slow down and trace the grain of the world with uncannily close attention. Perhaps this is one reason for his choice to photograph a page of Braille. He wants viewers, like the man cured of blindness in the famous biblical story, to see the things he photographs as if for the first time.
Measurements
275 x 420 mm image size
Artist
Credit
Collection of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery. Purchased 1995 with funds from the Dunedin Public Art Gallery Society.
Accession number
18-1995
