Fiona Pardington: Taniwha

This is a block of soap, Taniwha, a lot of people would have seen it. Every time I look at the image I can smell the soap. These particular blocks of soap were in my grandmother’s laundry. She lived in a state house in Mt Roskill and it had an old copper in it and these were up on the wall with her washing powder – they were there for years. So that smell is a very kind of happy and comforting smell. Taniwha soap in our family has a bit of a history because my great aunt Olive, my grandfather’s sister, worked for the Methodist Mission for years – she was an unmarried woman who was just doing heaps of charity all the time.

She had a little Morris Minor, one the ones that had the wood on the back, and there would always be boxes of soap – of Taniwha soap – in the back because she would be giving it out to the people who couldn’t afford washing powder. So we always had it and my grandmother always had it – so it always reminded me of my aunt Olive and her good works. She got a Queen’s Service Medal for her charity work so she was a real sweet little lady. She was part Maori, as was my grandad, and they were both adopted by a family that lived in Harcourt Street, in Ponsonby. So for me, this is quite a personal work.

It did take me quite a long time to work out how to photograph it, I had the soap in the studio for quite a long time, but I didn’t want to jump the gun, I knew that it was quite difficult to do well and to kind of conserve the spirit of it and the emotional content of it.

The waxy quality and the semi-transparent quality of the soap – that was something that I had to work at, also because the name is negatively indented into the soap, that was just a matter of using a light across the surface then you can pick up all the little bits dust and spots and the kind of grungy aspects of it, works against the idea of the soap.

I do treat the soap photograph as a form of portraiture, it’s something that I’ve developed out of my interests in animism and spectrums of consciousness as that there are levels of consciousness in everything from stones up to animals and then up to people. That’s something that I try to respect in this object even if it isn’t a consciousness, it’s just a kind of charge of history and personal feeling.

这张相片里是一块新西兰出品的香皂，它的牌子是‘塔尼法’，我想很多人都见过。每当我看见这张相片的时候，我仿佛总是能嗅到从相片中散发出来的馨香。相片中的这块香皂属于我祖母的洗衣间。我的祖母曾经居住在洛斯基尔山的一幢政府房里，和这块混合着铜屑的香皂一起悬挂在房子洗衣间墙上的，还有她的洗衣粉。在我的记忆里，许多年了，它们都没有挪过地方。所以对我来说，从相片中散发出的和祖母有关的味道是令人愉悦、给人以慰藉的。

‘塔尼法’香皂和我的家族颇有渊源。我的姑祖母奥立芙是基督教循道宗的传教士，她是一位投身于慈善事业而终身未婚的女子。她有一辆莫里斯米勒小型汽车，是车尾有着木质边框的那一种。在这辆车的尾箱里总是有一箱又一箱的香皂，都是‘塔尼法’牌的，用以赠给那些没有钱购买洗衣用品的人。所以我们家，以及我的祖母也一直是这些香皂的用户。这些香皂总能让我想起我的姑祖母和她的公益事业。姑祖母后来得到了一枚用以表彰她善举的女王服务勋章。和我的祖父一样，她有一半的毛利血统，他们在幼年时被庞森比哈库德街的一家人领养，所以对于我来说，这是一幅和我个人渊源甚深的作品。

思考如何拍下这张照片花费了我很长一段时间。虽然这块香皂一直躺在我的工作室里，我却不想仓促的为它造像。因为我了解想要在照片中记录下和某种物品有关的灵魂与感情并非易事。

在拍摄的时候，我注重于表现蜡的质感和半透明的视觉效果，由于刻印在香皂表面的钢印在简单的一道光束的烘托之下，突显出了粗糙斑驳的表面以及其上停留的灰尘，使得这幅作品不仅仅局限于表现香皂的传统样貌。

我把对这块香皂的拍摄看成一幅人像摄影。在泛灵论看来，从石头到动物再到人类，都有自主的意识。我一直对自己拍摄的物件有种尊敬，虽然它并不是一个有自主意识的生灵，但却承载着一段个人的历史与感情。