New Zealand photographer Jennifer French has succeeded, perhaps unusually, in practising her medium on both sides of the art and commercial divide. Graduating with a BFA from the University of Auckland’s Elam School of Fine Arts in 1987, French has carved a niche for herself as New Zealand’s leading specialist photographer of art. For the past decade French has worked closely with Creative New Zealand in photographically documenting New Zealand’s projects at the Venice Biennale, and she remains Gallery Photographer at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) has informed her approach to image-making: fluid ideas of time, duration, intuition, and the nature of perception informed by such thinking. French states ‘Photography, in the creation of the image, is an effect performed upon the object, by a photographer. It is a caress. It is a personal testament, a set of subjective mysteries. A use of image as metaphor for the act of looking.’ At the same time, French considers the photographic image as technologically arbitrary – a framing, a set of tonalities and colour, created by an optical system.
