NZ House & Garden has interviewed Jane Ussher about her new book with John Walsh. Rooms: Portraits of remarkable New Zealand interiors features 300-plus superb images from remarkable houses around Aotearoa. Watch Jane talk about the process of creating the book.
‘Photographer Jane Ussher has shot scores of portraits and inside spaces in her long and well-recognised career. Inspired oddly by an 18-month stint documenting the huts built by Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton in Antarctica, she has found her subject matter in a variety of residential settings, many while on commission from NZ House & Garden: big and small homes, heritage houses, converted churches and apartments. In her new book Rooms she has selected images from her archives, but most are from recent shoots of houses that have never been published before and are unlikely to find a wider forum.
Jane’s enthusiasm for photographing interior spaces became entwined with her interest in the practice of collecting. Her room portraits are evidence both of her fascination with the urge to collect objects and curate their display, and her masterly framing of the “thing worlds” that result from this urge.
What her photographs present are marriages of things and their settings. The placement and often the selection of the objects complement the characteristics of the host spaces – their dimensions and proportions, materials and details, light and shade.’
Read the full article here.
