Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs: There are artists who slap you with their images and others who stab you slowly with their lens. Fiona Pardington (born in 1961), this New Zealand magician of photography, definitely belongs to the latter category. Her work is a cannibal feast where beauty devours death and death swallows beauty.
Here is an artist who turns museums into luxurious morgues and still lifes into existential manifestos. While some contemporary photographers exhaust themselves documenting reality like image accountants, Pardington dissects reality with the surgical precision of a forensic doctor possessed by Caravaggio’s spirit. She is the Medea of the darkroom, sacrificing her subjects on the altar of art to resurrect them in a new aesthetic dimension.
Take her series of “heitiki”, those traditional Maori jade pendants. Where the photographic establishment is content to catalog these objects as ethnographic curiosities, Pardington transforms them into hallucinatory icons, floating in a photographic void that would make Mark Rothko envious. Bataille spoke of the “accursed share”, that necessity of sacrifice and unproductive expenditure in every culture. Pardington viscerally understands this truth: her photographs are acts of sublime transgression, where every object becomes an offering to some deity of the image.
Her practice is haunted by what Roland Barthes called the “that-has-been” of photography, the medium’s unique ability to capture what is already dead. But where Barthes theorized, Pardington materializes. Her recent still lifes are not mere tributes to 17th-century vanitas—they are vanitas for our era of mass extinction and ecological disaster. A dead albatross photographed by Pardington is not just a comment on ocean pollution; it is a visual meditation on our own finitude that would make Heidegger weep.
When she photographs the 19th-century head casts created by phrenologist Pierre-Marie Dumoutier, she does not merely document the vestiges of scientific colonialism. No, she performs an act of photographic necromancy, summoning the ghosts of her Ngāi Tahu ancestors to give them a spectral presence in our present. This is Walter Benjamin in action, mechanical reproduction of art transformed into a ritual of resurrection.
Her technique is an explosive mix of classical formal rigor and baroque excess. In her images, black is not an absence of light but a black hole threatening to engulf the viewer. Her prints are so precise they verge on the obscene, as if she wants us to visually touch the very texture of death. She pushes the photographic medium to its limits, much as Bacon twisted his figures until they screamed.
What is fascinating is her ability to transform the most banal object into a sacred relic. A simple plastic bottle washed up on a beach becomes a contemporary memento mori under her lens. A glass skull photographed in her studio is no longer just a kitsch trinket but a meditation on the artificiality of our modern funeral rituals. Even her wilted flowers seem more alive than nature itself, as if decomposition were a superior form of vitality.
Pardington’s photography is an exercise in resistance against cultural amnesia. In a world where images are consumed and discarded at lightning speed, she creates photographs that demand slow, almost painful contemplation. Each image is a visual trap, a machine for slowing time. She understands, as few artists do today, that true transgression is no longer in shock but in duration.
She practices what I would call an “aesthetic of repair”. When she photographs taxidermy specimens in museum collections, she does not simply document their state of preservation. She restores their lost dignity, transforming their death into a form of aesthetic survival. This is Derrida in practice, deconstruction that becomes reconstruction.
Her work on the “huia”, those extinct New Zealand birds, is particularly revealing. By photographing their feathers preserved in museums, she does more than commemorate a vanished species. She creates what Georges Didi-Huberman would call “surviving images”, visual ghosts that continue to haunt our present. It is a form of poetic justice: the camera, that modern instrument which has documented so much destruction, becomes in her hands a tool for symbolic repair.
But make no mistake, there is nothing sentimental about her approach. Her compassion is fierce, her tenderness predatory. She photographs death as others photograph love, with a troubling mix of intimacy and distance. This is what makes her work so unsettling: she forces us to look at what we usually prefer to ignore, yet she does so with such formal mastery that we cannot look away.
In her more recent still life series, she pushes this dialectic between beauty and destruction even further. She arranges complex compositions mixing found objects, family relics, and the detritus of consumer society. The result is a sort of contemporary “wunderkammer” where the sublime meets the trivial. It’s Susan Sontag in three dimensions: a reflection on our fetishistic relationship with objects, but also on our inability to truly confront our own mortality.
I think particularly of her images of Portuguese man-of-wars washed ashore, photographed on plastic surfaces that mimic their translucent texture. This is Baudrillard taken to the extreme: the simulacrum becomes more real than the original, the copy truer than the model. But unlike so many contemporary artists who revel in easy irony, Pardington fully embraces the paradox. She transforms this confusion between the natural and the artificial into a new form of visual truth.
Her use of lighting is particularly masterful. She does not merely illuminate her subjects; she sculpts the darkness around them. The black in her images is not just a backdrop but an active space that constantly threatens to swallow what she photographs. This is Tanizaki Jun’ichirō applied to contemporary photography: an exploration of how shadows can reveal more than light.
Pardington’s images function simultaneously as documents and metaphors. When she photographs a head cast of the Marquis de Sade, she does not just document a historical artifact. She creates a visual meditation on power, desire, and transgression that would have thrilled Michel Foucault. It is art history becoming visual philosophy.
If her early works were marked by a more directly political approach, particularly in her exploration of gender and identity issues, her recent work achieves an almost mystical dimension. She practices what I would call a “negative theology” of the image, where absence becomes presence and loss transforms into revelation. Each photograph is like a visual prayer addressed to an absent god.
Pardington creates photographs that demand and deserve our time. She understands that true radicality today lies not in easy provocation but in creating images that resist immediate consumption. Her work is a form of resistance against the general acceleration of our visual culture, a plea for a slower, deeper way of seeing.
She is not just a photographer; she is a philosopher of the image who uses the camera as Nietzsche used the hammer—to probe the hollow idols of our visual culture. Her work reminds us that photography can still be an act of thought, not just a technical exercise or a commercial gesture.
For those who still think photography is a minor art, Pardington’s work is a masterful slap. She demonstrates that the camera can be as expressive as the brush, as precise as the scalpel, as profound as the pen. In her hands, photography becomes what it has always potentially been: a way of seeing what lies behind appearances, a tool for making the invisible visible.
And for those who complain that contemporary art has become too conceptual, too disconnected from beauty, Pardington proves that it is possible to be intellectually rigorous without sacrificing the emotional power of the image. Her work is living proof that beauty can be subversive and that critical thought can be sensual.
Fiona Pardington is not just a great New Zealand photographer; she is an artist redefining what photography can be in the 21st century. Her work is a visual manifesto for an art that rejects the ease of spectacle while embracing the power of the image. She shows us that the true avant-garde may not be in perpetual rupture but in a deeper attention to the world and its mysteries.