Featured Artist: Kathryn McCool

Several years ago we scanned a large batch of negatives for New Zealand-born photographer Kathryn McCool, and we knew they were something special back then; we asked Kathryn if we could interview her about her compelling trove of images, but the timing wasn't right.  Fast forward to present day, and many of those images have now garnered widespread acclaim in the form of her excellent photo book, "P.North".

Before "P.North" was even a concept, Kathryn had worked on the archive intermittently over the years, her collection gradually coalescing into a project called "Jubilee Years". These caught the eye of Photo Australia who invited her to exhibit her images in 2021, thus facilitating their curation.  Kathryn was then shortlisted in the Perimeter Small Book Prize, with Perimeter Books approaching her to discuss publishing her archive soon after.

Although the majority of these images were taken during the 1980's and 1990's across rural New Zealand and Australia, "P.North" purposefully strives to craft a narrative of a mysterious territory that exists in an indefinable time and place. 

Drifting through the years without context, McCool's subjects in "P.North" are endowed with equal significance and presence in each frame, existing within a realm of ambiguous intent and haunting allure that reflect no specific era or location, but the inner workings of Kathryn's own mind.

If you're any kind of photography enthusiast, we highly recommend checking out "P.North", available at Perimeter Books here. Now, on to the interview!

Hi Kathryn, thanks for talking to us today. Could you share with us a brief overview of your photographic practice and background? Where did your love for photography begin?
Thank you for checking out my work.

I think I was very aware of the power of a photograph from quite a young age. My parents didn’t take many family photos, so the impact of the few they did take was very intense for me. I understood that even though the photograph existed, the time it captured no longer did, and that kind of winded me; I grasped the idea that even with the picture in your hand, something was lost, and it was a grave and mysterious concept for my young brain to wrestle with!

When I was 18, my father gave me a camera—a Ricoh SLR —that he had acquired from an auction. The auctioneer advised him to keep the needle in the middle of the exposure guide, and that was the extent of my instruction. I took the camera with me to Wellington, stepped off the bus, and began photographing people on the streets. I later switched to a Rolleiflex and I also used a Diana camera. (I actually got one when I was very young from a variety store for $1.25 which I mainly wore around my neck for looks).

We’d love to chat to you about your photo book, ‘P.North’. Could you describe the core premise of "P.North", and how it came to fruition?

It's essentially is a book of images about an unknown place even though it is made of portraits and landscapes from known places, (for example Bunnythorpe and Palmerston North in NZ). The title P.North has been described as being ‘abbreviated into a cipher becoming an amorphous catch-all, a dreamland…*’ I think this is accurate.

It is like P.North has had two lives: one when I was taking the photos 30 years ago, and the second existing assembled as a book. While I was actually photographing, it did not exist in my mind as a book but as a string of photos that were unrelated but through my drawing up a territory in my mind, belonging to each other. It is by being in a book that it becomes a cohesive place; a country of its own.

The book came into fruition when NZ artist Michael Stevenson contacted me to ask for a copy of a photo and this led me to getting the negatives scanned. I put together a bunch of photos and was shortlisted in the Perimeter Small Book Prize in 2018 and from that came the offer of a publication. Around this time I got myself a camera and started photographing with film again.

It’s incredible that the images in "P.North" were captured with no formal photographic training, and many at an early period in your photographic practise. Did you approach your subjects with an articulated sense of purpose at the time, or was it all very much an intuitive thing?

It was both an intuitive and intentional thing, I believe. After not viewing them for so long, I recognised many compositional elements in some photos that, at the time, I didn’t fully register. In other photographs, I was more present and aware. I almost never filled a roll of the same subject most often it was one or two frames per subject.

I approached my subjects with a sense of urgency. I believed that my world, as I knew it, was drawing to a close, so I was quite driven. Remember, this was in the 1980s, and New Zealand was undergoing a type of change unwitnessed up to this point even though my photographs were not a commentary on this. I think New Zealanders felt deeply this sense of being on the edge of the world and as global culture was becoming more homogenised. I didn’t want to leave being on that edge.

You’ve mentioned in earlier conversations that these images were more self-portraits than anything. In what ways does this manifest in "P.North"? Is there a particular image in the book that reflects this statement more clearly than others?

I’d say they were self-portraits in both the personal and broader sense. After living in the city Auckland for a year or so, I returned to my home in rural Manawatu in 1987 with a renewed sense of identity coming from an understanding of who I was not and where I didn’t belong. And being home meant naming what was true to me—this person, this road, this yard. The self-portraits closest to me are the ones of the girl in the kitchen and the boy smoking on the steps. And the boy in the tracksuit. All for reasons of intense familiarity in posture; it was like describing myself.

Was there any particular media or photographer that was highly influential on your photographic style around the time of shooting the images in ‘P.North’?
Michael Stevenson was a big influence even though a number of the photos were taken before we met. The American photographers were also an influence: Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Larry Fink, Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, and Diane Arbus, although I really stopped looking at photography when I was really deep into taking a lot of my own work. I just had to do my own thing and not put my head up and look, lest I'd be pushed around by other ideas that I felt I wasn't ready for.

What was your connection to the people and places in the photographs?

Some of the people were familiar to me like I either knew them or I saw them around. Then there were the people who I photographed through a chance meeting at a rodeo or a show for example. I did a lot of driving around looking for landscapes that had an ambiguity to them to accompany these portraits as a kind of laconic subtext.

Did you feel at the time that the photos were successful in what you wanted to convey about your subjects?
I think I was too kind of impatient to look at the negatives properly to get an idea if they were successful or not. I had it in my head that I knew which photo I wanted before I developed the film and really didn’t look at the other possibilities due to the expense of paper. I would just look at the negatives to get an idea of where I was heading.

Have your feelings about these images changed over time? In what ways do your assessment of the photos differ from then and now?
When I first started looking at them after all those years, it was strange and choked up time. I wanted to go back there!

Technically, I see the work differently; the things I saw as mistakes in certain photos I now see as part of my photographic style. I found myself wishing my gaze had been a little broader; I'd have a lot more images.

I have learned that I need a cooling-off period for a photograph of at least a couple of years in order for me to really see it. For example, I am now looking at a body of work from the early 2000s that I am feeling kinder toward. I am possibly too critical, or perhaps I am just so astonished by the photography of others that the standard seems stratospheric.

How did you approach the sequencing of your images in "P.North"? Did you focus on a more chronological timeline, or lean into what worked best for a cohesive narrative?
There is no timeline in P. North. The sequencing was the work of Dan Rule and Justine Ellis, with Ash Holmes at Perimeter. It was really interesting to watch. I came in with a clutch of loosely ordered photographs, and Dan and Justine just laid them out and walked around them and moved them as they saw it take shape, with Ash adding her thoughts as well. They are just super skilled and intuitive at this, and we wound up with something that worked well; the sequence changes gear interestingly throughout the book I feel.

Seeing as most of the images in the book were taken during the 80’s and 90’s, there’s a significant time gap between your ‘P.North’ work and the present day. What is the difference between the work you made then and your photography practice now?
Other than my time using digital, I am still using the same type of camera and film. As for what I am photographing now, little has changed, in fact there are a couple photos in P. North that were taken relatively recently.

If I had to name a difference between the photos now and then it would be that people have changed, along with the context and conversation around photographing them. Consequently, how my work is and will be viewed has changed as a result. What it feels like to walk around with a camera has changed; I am a different person to who I was and it feels like another practice to what I once had.

Thanks for taking the time to speak to us today Kathryn. Can you share anything about projects you are currently working on, or have planned for the rest of the year?
Over the winter I’ll edit some video footage I shot in the US a while back and I’ll keep taking photographs for what will eventually be another book. I am also hoping to either get to the US or back to NZ for a photo trip sometime in the next couple of years.

*Blake Andrew https://blog.photoeye.com/2023...