Home On The Road:
Photographer Cally Whitham
Captures Images of Old Houses While On the Move.
Photographer Cally Whitham
Captures Images of Old Houses While On the Move.
Tell us a bit about the photography subjects you gravitate towards.
There are a couple of areas I always seem to gravitate to - old stuff and animals and birds. I have always had a strong sense of nostalgia. When I was a child, we often visited my great aunt's farm and I just loved the long drive there, looking out the window on the way, and the rural environment, the open spaces to explore and the emptiness of the countryside. I now live rurally, so I tend to photograph my environment, hence all the domestic birds, livestock and rural vistas.
There are a couple of areas I always seem to gravitate to - old stuff and animals and birds. I have always had a strong sense of nostalgia. When I was a child, we often visited my great aunt's farm and I just loved the long drive there, looking out the window on the way, and the rural environment, the open spaces to explore and the emptiness of the countryside. I now live rurally, so I tend to photograph my environment, hence all the domestic birds, livestock and rural vistas.
What was the inspiration behind this project, Dwell II?
We travel a fair bit by car as we live a long way out of the city, and the frequent road trips give you time (as a passenger) to really soak up the rural landscape and the houses that are dotted around it. Most are built in a similar era - around the 1930s to 1950s, depending on their location and proximity to town. Houses closer to old settlements are much older, and as they get further away they become newer.
We travel a fair bit by car as we live a long way out of the city, and the frequent road trips give you time (as a passenger) to really soak up the rural landscape and the houses that are dotted around it. Most are built in a similar era - around the 1930s to 1950s, depending on their location and proximity to town. Houses closer to old settlements are much older, and as they get further away they become newer.
The houses are just simple, honest farm-houses built in a time when there was no desire for 'resale value' or "indoor/outdoor flow or guest rooms and offices. They were just built as a dwelling for a family to grow up in and to come back to when the day on the farm was done. So, the idea really was built around that - creating a kind of typology of rural homes of no significance, and then presenting them in a way that created a new kind of value or reminded us of something we may have forgotten.
Did you go looking for particular kinds of buildings, or just snap them whenever you saw them?
The houses are dotted along the roadside around New Zealand, mostly in the upper North Island. There are certainly areas I would like to go to photograph, but I actually need a driver as I shoot from a moving car. I just get a few seconds to capture them and then they are gone. This is the way these houses are typically viewed - as we drive past - so the shooting style is sympathetic to that. So, unless I can con someone into driving me around, I wait until a road trip to capture new work.
The houses are dotted along the roadside around New Zealand, mostly in the upper North Island. There are certainly areas I would like to go to photograph, but I actually need a driver as I shoot from a moving car. I just get a few seconds to capture them and then they are gone. This is the way these houses are typically viewed - as we drive past - so the shooting style is sympathetic to that. So, unless I can con someone into driving me around, I wait until a road trip to capture new work.
Did you grow up in a house like this? What do you think the images say about ordinary people's homes?
| grew up in Devonport, which is now a lovely old seaside village in Auckland. When I lived there in the 1980s, it was not considered the desirable destination that it is these days. It was still a backwater. People were starting to do up the houses, but no one lived in a fully restored home with beautifully landscaped gardens.
I'm not sure what others take from the images, but for me I think they speak to a place just being a 'home'. The houses I photograph are just simple dwellings that are the kinds of places that people tend to live in for a very long time. A house used to be part of the family, part of the history of a family, and now it's not. We used to live in homes, but now we just live in real estate.
| grew up in Devonport, which is now a lovely old seaside village in Auckland. When I lived there in the 1980s, it was not considered the desirable destination that it is these days. It was still a backwater. People were starting to do up the houses, but no one lived in a fully restored home with beautifully landscaped gardens.
I'm not sure what others take from the images, but for me I think they speak to a place just being a 'home'. The houses I photograph are just simple dwellings that are the kinds of places that people tend to live in for a very long time. A house used to be part of the family, part of the history of a family, and now it's not. We used to live in homes, but now we just live in real estate.
