26 Mar 2022

Robert Leonard: the surprising photographs of a young Jane Campion

From Saturday Morning, 4:45 pm on 26 March 2022

With her filmmaking Dame Jane Campion has often surprised - as she also did with comments at the recent Critics Choice Awards, for which she has apologised.

And she surprises again with photos from her early years when she was the muse of photographer John Lethbridge.

Shot during the late 1970s, the images were taken by Lethbridge on the Campion family farm at Peka Peka, north of Wellington, and on the Sydney Harbour Bridge, with Campion credited as 'performer-assistant'.

As theatrically camp and comic as they are dark and glamorous, the photographs blend performance art and fashion.

Originally from New Zealand, Lethbridge went on to be a key artistic figure in Australia during the 80s.

Former senior curator at City Gallery Wellington, Robert Leonard has curated the exhibition: John Lethbridge Divination: Performance Photographs 1978-82, which is showing at Webb's new Wellington-based gallery from 30 March to 23 April.

Leonard encountered Lethbridge's art when co-curating Action Replay, a series of exhibitions in the late 1990s about New Zealand's experimental sculpture and post-object art in the 1970s.

Robert Leonard

Robert Leonard Photo: Supplied

"In '77 he ... started making these photographs that were kind of something between performance art documentation and fashion photography... he was interested in a discussion of art moving into fashion magazines," Leonard said.

The images were "very prescient," he says, leaning forward into the 80s.

Campion and Lethbridge were partners at the time, and remain friends. Leonard spoke with both of them in preparation for the exhibition. He said Campion was happy to be credited as a 'performer assistant', however Lethbridge felt some of the images were more of a collaboration.

"They start being more performative and then they lean into more symbolic tableaus, but I think that Jane probably maybe had quite a lot of engagement with those farm life pictures," Leonard said.

"I can just imagine them there on holiday shooting these photographs, dressed like she's come out of a nightclub, but on her parents farm - there's kind of a naughty aspect to them."

One image, with Campion mounted on a saddle up a ladder and holding a carrot ahead of her, presents interesting imagery now, in the context of Campion's new film The Power of the Dog, Leonard said.

"It seems to play on our ideas about Jane Campion and her ambition and her drive as a filmmaker, ...it's full of this sense of momentum and drive, which seems to be very pertinent to her as a person now, having made these films."

In 2020, Lethbridge's house in Australia burned down in the bush fires, along with almost all of his life's work. One hard-drive of photos was saved, and it included these photos.

In her conversation with Leonard about the photos, Campion told him that working with Lethbridge was formative in her development as a filmmaker.

"I saw how John worked every minute of the day, learning from others and getting me to model for him - which in the end I got a bit sick of - but it taught me what hard work is.

"From John I learned what it meant to develop work or to develop yourself to do the work. I learned from him and I copied him, and that's been absolutely essential to how I've been able to make my career."