First initiated in 2004, Si C’est (if it is) is a collaborative project between photographer Fiona Amundsen and writer Tim Corballis. For the latest billboards project they enlarge selected works from their ongoing series investigating Wynyard Point (also known as the Tank Farm), a now largely demolished part of Auckland’s industrial waterfront. The area embodies Amundsen’s attraction to unpopulated urban sites and she uses photography as a means of continuing an anthropological form of research. In this project, the site is also utilised to lay bare the individual characteristics of each artist’s chosen medium.
The specific traits of these different approaches are elucidated through the juxtaposition of their individual works. They seek to explore disrupting subjectivities implicit to both poetry and photography. For Amundsen and Corballis, photography represents a ‘recording’ subjectivity (the object must be there, in front of the camera), while writing represents a ‘controlling’ one (every feature of a text being a product of a decision).