Lucien Rizos
  • home
    • work >
      • photography, documentary style projects >
        • early work. pre 1977
        • Romanian Photos 1977-1978
        • A Man Walks Out Of A Bar... 1979-1982 >
          • A Man...some contact sheets
          • some rejects from A Man Walks Out Of A Bar... 1979-1982
        • Traffic Lights 1981 >
          • some contact sheets
        • McDonald's Corner 1983 >
          • some contact sheets 1983
        • 5 minutes on street corner. Whanganui
        • LAST PHOTOS 1984
        • post last photos 1984-1986
        • telephoto from car 2002
        • unposed portraits 2014-15 >
          • more Unposed Portraits
        • memories 2016
        • Marble Art Ltd. 2017 >
          • exhibition marble art ltd exhib photos
        • remuera 2018
        • Everything. 2019-2021 >
          • A Man Of His Time Exhibition 2020
          • Lucien Rizos .Everything. exhibition.2022
        • family photos and headstones 2023
        • Marble Art Ltd 2024 >
          • exhibition photos. Marble Art Ltd 2024
      • photography related projects >
        • ANZAC day 1984
        • Blue skies. Green grass. 1984-86
        • searching for... 1984-1986
        • Silver Lining 1988
        • family album 1989
        • My Relationship with... >
          • My Relationship With Cartier Bresson 1986-1992
          • My Relationship With The Old Masters 1986
        • New Work Studio 1995
        • Analogies 2000-2001
        • My Reality The Camera 2002
        • fringes and backgrounds 2002
        • P O V 2015
      • bits and pieces (photography) in a documentary style. 2015- >
        • people from a distance
        • rural homes from a moving bus
        • random, unconnected photographs.
      • movies >
        • drive-by. pittsburgh 2005
        • to and fro. 2006 spin. 2006
        • Hi Mary... 2007
        • glide 2008
        • from the car. circa 2009-
        • from the bus. circa 2009-
        • musicians at work. 2010
        • Buskers, various. 2009-2010
        • GDBY PK P. 2012
        • reverberation 2012
        • around the perimeter 2016
        • Where's Wally? 2019
      • Rubbings. 1998-1999 >
        • rubbings. literal
        • rubbings. non literal.
    • text >
      • My Relationship With The Old Masters, review. Ian Wedde. 1986
      • A Man Walks Out Of A Bar... >
        • Essay. Ian Wedde. A Man Walks Out Of A Bar.
        • Essay. Damian Skinner. New Zealand Photographs.
        • Review. Peter Ireland. S'kite
        • Review. Peter Ireland. New Zealand Listener
        • Review. Abby Cunnane. Lumiere.net.nz
        • Review. The Landfall Review On Line. David Eggleton
        • Essay. Greg O'Brien. A Man Walks Out Of A Bar.
      • Essay. Greg O'Brien. Where I Find Myself
      • Aaron Lister. Art New Zealand. Springbok Tour Book. >
        • springbok tour book. 1 contact sheet
      • certain materialities. Damian Skinner. 2017
      • the empire strikes back.Peter Ireland 2017
      • Everything. 2019-2021 >
        • Lucien Rizos: Processing Power. Robert Leonard 2022
        • Secret life of Gerald.Eva Corlett.Guardian.
    • information >
      • biography and chronology
    • CONTACT
    • publications, books

The Landfall Review On Line.
David Eggleton


Picture
In French critic Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Barthes describes early cameras with their wooden cabinets as ‘clocks for seeing’. You could apply the same metaphor to the retro-vision offered by Lucien Rizos’s photo-bookA Man Walks Out of a Bar: New Zealand Photographs, 1979—1982. Its sixty-six black-and-white photographs, selected from an accumulation of thousands made while Rizos was a violinist on tour with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, offer the sensation of time travel, and also something of the sensation of their instantaneous making. Essays by Damian Skinner and Ian Wedde ruminate on lost time recovered in these photographs. What once was urgent has been locked into the permanent Now of yesterday.
            This book, a homage of sorts, as Ian Wedde points out, to Robert Frank’s famous 1959 road trip selection of photographs The Americans, and steeped philosophically in the climate of post-World War Two existentialism, has transferred its analogue images into the digital age by smoothing them seamlessly into grey-on-grey. Thus Rizos’s New Zealand is rendered in an atmospheric Parisian grisaille. But in this artful rendering of time lost, arranged loosely into a narrative of riffs and sequences and ‘movements’ that imply the flicker of moving film, of a road movie, what we miss, or what our attention is drawn to, is the absent soundtrack, and how it is signified visually.
            The title offers the first droll signpost. It implies, perhaps, the beginning of a shaggy dog story, to be followed by appreciative chuckles, as well as being a literal description of the cover photograph, but a second look at that photograph suggests that the missing noise is not bar chatter, but some interior music, to the beat of which the man in question is skipping along, with a sway in his step, his pace quickening, his tempo accelerando, in keeping with the images inside the book. The photograph also implies the snatched glimpse of the passer-by, a consequence of the good hand-eye coordination and reflex actions of the alert snapper.
            It signals, too, the scope of the project. Rizos is photographing the rhythms of daily existence in the form of chance encounters. He photographs people caught unaware, or barely aware, or else surprised and curious. Moments of exposure made on the fly taken together constitute a sustained momentum, a series of punctuation points, the sensation of movement confirmed, for example, by the way the man walking out of a bar meets the photographer’s sideways glance, his gaze, as if to mirror his curiosity.
            Rizos, meanwhile, hurries on in search of more arrested moments, in search of the spirit of New Zealand, hoping to make something of consequence from the inconsequential. If Haruhiko Sameshima is interested in examining what varnished photography might consist of, Rizos aims to be the unvarnished photographer, reacting to strangers.
            A study of the lull before the watershed, the last of the Muldoon Years, AMWOOAB forms an interesting counterpoint to Ans Westra’s photo-book of a decade earlier, Notes on the Country I Live In (1972), which presents us as New Zealanders as static, hieratic, often heroic figures. By comparison, Rizos has photographed people who look boxed-in, squeezed into their small British cars, or peering out of a tea-room window disconsolately; they are the grey ghosts and pale doubles of Westra’s people — the same people, perhaps, at the fag-end of a decade of euphoria. In these studies of small-town settings, even the outdoors seems claustrophobic; the skies are permanently overcast — this is Fortress New Zealand.
            Editorial choices are made so that Rizos avoids flashpoints such as political protest rallies, instead his wanderings and his body language diagnoses imply a country locked in space and time, whose scruffy and scrubby surroundings convey a sense of imprisonment, with the Great Escape taking the form of mass exodus to Australia.
            Improvising like a jazz musician, Rizos plays an air upon the theme of emotional repression. It’s as if he’s gone looking for crowds, for camaraderie, and found mostly solitaries wrapped in gloom, like a nation of professional mourners. He’s trying to make a sense of isolation palpable, trying to make anxiety palpable, scenting it in petrol fumes and scorched rubber, in beery but mostly deserted lounge bars, and in smoky tea-rooms, where over the formica table-tops, with their freight of metal ashtrays, individuals are engaged in sour tea-swilling and irritable newspaper-rustling interludes. This is period-era comedy or drama which could have found its inspiration in the writings of Samuel Beckett.
            Pedestrians trot or shuffle, pushchairs squeak. All is locomotion. The mutton-chopped long-hair in his white woolly cardigan drives by, glowering, his elbow plonked on the sill of the open car window. Everyone is preoccupied, solipsistic, oblivious. This is a corpus of imagery with a single-minded conviction.
            Then Rizos, too, moves on — down a state highway, photographing through the car window a house almost by accident. He snatches the moment and renders it as sensation. The subject is the sandblasted leaping gazelles on the glass front doors. Clouds lour and the hills are bare and stark. The doors are caught centre-frame, but they are emphatically shut.

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  • home
    • work >
      • photography, documentary style projects >
        • early work. pre 1977
        • Romanian Photos 1977-1978
        • A Man Walks Out Of A Bar... 1979-1982 >
          • A Man...some contact sheets
          • some rejects from A Man Walks Out Of A Bar... 1979-1982
        • Traffic Lights 1981 >
          • some contact sheets
        • McDonald's Corner 1983 >
          • some contact sheets 1983
        • 5 minutes on street corner. Whanganui
        • LAST PHOTOS 1984
        • post last photos 1984-1986
        • telephoto from car 2002
        • unposed portraits 2014-15 >
          • more Unposed Portraits
        • memories 2016
        • Marble Art Ltd. 2017 >
          • exhibition marble art ltd exhib photos
        • remuera 2018
        • Everything. 2019-2021 >
          • A Man Of His Time Exhibition 2020
          • Lucien Rizos .Everything. exhibition.2022
        • family photos and headstones 2023
        • Marble Art Ltd 2024 >
          • exhibition photos. Marble Art Ltd 2024
      • photography related projects >
        • ANZAC day 1984
        • Blue skies. Green grass. 1984-86
        • searching for... 1984-1986
        • Silver Lining 1988
        • family album 1989
        • My Relationship with... >
          • My Relationship With Cartier Bresson 1986-1992
          • My Relationship With The Old Masters 1986
        • New Work Studio 1995
        • Analogies 2000-2001
        • My Reality The Camera 2002
        • fringes and backgrounds 2002
        • P O V 2015
      • bits and pieces (photography) in a documentary style. 2015- >
        • people from a distance
        • rural homes from a moving bus
        • random, unconnected photographs.
      • movies >
        • drive-by. pittsburgh 2005
        • to and fro. 2006 spin. 2006
        • Hi Mary... 2007
        • glide 2008
        • from the car. circa 2009-
        • from the bus. circa 2009-
        • musicians at work. 2010
        • Buskers, various. 2009-2010
        • GDBY PK P. 2012
        • reverberation 2012
        • around the perimeter 2016
        • Where's Wally? 2019
      • Rubbings. 1998-1999 >
        • rubbings. literal
        • rubbings. non literal.
    • text >
      • My Relationship With The Old Masters, review. Ian Wedde. 1986
      • A Man Walks Out Of A Bar... >
        • Essay. Ian Wedde. A Man Walks Out Of A Bar.
        • Essay. Damian Skinner. New Zealand Photographs.
        • Review. Peter Ireland. S'kite
        • Review. Peter Ireland. New Zealand Listener
        • Review. Abby Cunnane. Lumiere.net.nz
        • Review. The Landfall Review On Line. David Eggleton
        • Essay. Greg O'Brien. A Man Walks Out Of A Bar.
      • Essay. Greg O'Brien. Where I Find Myself
      • Aaron Lister. Art New Zealand. Springbok Tour Book. >
        • springbok tour book. 1 contact sheet
      • certain materialities. Damian Skinner. 2017
      • the empire strikes back.Peter Ireland 2017
      • Everything. 2019-2021 >
        • Lucien Rizos: Processing Power. Robert Leonard 2022
        • Secret life of Gerald.Eva Corlett.Guardian.
    • information >
      • biography and chronology
    • CONTACT
    • publications, books