Peter Peryer: Photographer

Peter Peryer is one of New Zealand’s leading contemporary photographers. Peryer is also an innovative photographer, constantly refining his photographic practice, notably with his embrace of digital photography from 1998 and increasing interest in colour. Peter Peryer: Photographer includes a section of eighty photographs, the largest body of Peryer’s work yet assembled, personally selected by the photographer. A wide-ranging introduction to Peryer’s work, by Peter Simpson, and an illustrated autobiographical essay by Peryer himself are also included. Interested in doubles, pattern and repetition, problems of scale, the surreal and the grotesque, Peryer’s work most often focuses on the ‘thingness’ of his subjects and objects. Here are whitebait, shells, two goats, a Meccano bus, a ‘sand shark’, planes and a windsock, as well as a Moeraki boulder, the trig on Rangitoto and the Alexandra clock. Rich in lovingly examined bits and pieces, and prompting a viewer always to think harder about their significance, this book is a quirky and intimate guide to Peryerland.