A tiny figure stands in front of a block of faded apartments. A big dog threatens to bound over a fence. A puddle of broken bottles on the asphalt hints at last night’s party. A pair of shoes, tied together by their laces, hangs suspended from a power line. This, in part, is Luca Macioce and Tak Soropa’s photographic vision of the Auckland suburb of Avondale.
The exhibition, opening tonight at Pitt Street’s CorpStudio, had its genesis when the two 18-year-olds approached Avondale rapper Tom Scott through Instagram. They took some photos of Scott and his family, and he loved them so much he made one of the photos the cover of his new album, released today under his latest moniker, Avantdale Bowling Club. He urged the young photographers to put together an exhibition. Macioce: “Initially, he just asked us to try and do Avondale justice through our photos. And we were like, ‘Yeah sure.’”
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When Scott saw what the duo had produced, he was blown away. “I was like, ‘Bro! Proud!’ I think they didn’t believe me after a while, ‘cos I was like ‘this one’s amazing’. Next one: ‘this one’s brilliant’.”
Soropa says the pair sought to find the natural beauty of the run-down suburb’s overlooked details. “We weren’t even looking for things that looked good. When you’re going through Avondale, there’s so much around and there’s such a sense of community. You could actually take a photo of anything, and it’s like just being able to stop a moment in time in a particular frame and just look at it. You can see beauty in so much.”
For Scott, the work perfectly ties into the themes of the album, the photographers’ younger eyes able to find specifics he might’ve missed. “Things that I wouldn’t see beauty in. And that’s my favourite shit to do, find beauty in the mundane. That’s what my whole album is attempting to do, and that’s what they did.”
The album’s first single, “Years Gone By” is a half-celebratory, half-melancholic year-by-year walk through Scott’s life, and the photographs, he says, encapsulate that journey: “My memories look like this.”
And finding beauty in those memories, in the everyday details of a life lived, is what Scott does in his own art. He’s found an ally in two photographers who have been alive for roughly half the time his memories cover. “How much of life is boring, mundane, monotonous? Most of it. So you’ve got to find poetry in that, and that’s what they’ve done.”
