Editors: Gwynneth Porter and Jane Wallace
Designer: Warren Olds and Anna Welham
Publisher: The Physics Room, 301 Montreal Street, Ōtautahi Christchurch 8011
© The Physics Room and the authors, 2026
Marie Shannon/ Life Stories
Trish Clark Gallery/ 12 March - 2 May 2026
Since working in a Sydney commercial gallery in my 20s I’ve always found discomfort in visiting them. The gallerist would inspect the surveillance cameras in real time and was known to announce that the gallery visitor was ‘dressed like a student.’ Which was code for them being an artist and therefore not not rich enough to buy art. So I always feel like an infiltrator. That I’m not the right audience. But I was always going to be an audience of Marie Shannon’s Life Stories at Trish Clark. It’s an archive/stockroom show of photographs and moving image works dating from the early eighties to the not-quite-present. It represents various bodies of work, packed uncomfortably full, hence my inclination to describe it as a stockroom show.
Regardless of the context, seeing Marie’s work is always like seeing a favourite band play live. All the big feelings that come with that. I’m really a huge fan and find endless fascination in both her thematic and formal dexterity, lithely slipping in and out of genres, moods, and methodologies, all with immense silver gelatin printing technicality. Here the show starts with a quiet little photograph titled The Decisive Moment (1982), awkwardly tacked onto the edge of a series of five larger scale Daybed works. By my calculation it’s the only work included from Marie’s time at Elam and is such an outlier in the show – its tiny scale, blithe immediacy, surreptitious perspective – that had I not taken the roomsheet I might have thought I’d imagined rather than remembered it. From an elevated perspective a foreshore is pictured, no horizon, just sand and sea taking up equal halves of the photo plane. There are a lot of footprints in the sand, and some waves in the ocean. The lone figure in a bundle of coats and the choppy sea give the air a bite. Almost imperceptible, just to the right of the figure, is a tiny dark smudge. I know the smudge to be a dog running and almost disappeared by a slow shutter speed.
Likely in reference to Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photobook of the same title, ‘the decisive moment’ describes a specific process of documentary photography by which the photographer simultaneously recognises the significance of an event, as well as the momentarily perfect arrangement of elements within the frame. The majority of Shannon’s work here is staged photography — single objects often on a black background, simultaneously controlled and un-anchored, or constructed and purposefully situated architectural maquettes. Cartier-Bresson’s title for the French edition is Images a la Sauvette — Images on the Run, which I took to mean images having their own agency, moving through time and place with dexterity, nipping between contexts and encounters, but of course could also mean the act of documentary photographing.
Weeks later I keep coming back to Shannon’s The Decisive Moment —a quiet and little auspicious omen.
An image that is on the run, off through the decades like an off lead dog.
A score for how to read everything that came after it.
A ghost story where a photographer comes to realise — after making a lot of photographs, becoming a mother, losing a partner, and compiling an archive/stockroom exhibition comprising four decades of work — that this photograph she took of a figure on the beach in the early 80s was, in fact, a photograph of herself, running.