After spending much of my late teens and twenties living overseas, I came back to this place which represented home for me. On my return, I encountered an eerie feeling: ‘home’ felt strangely unfamiliar. This prompted a desire to explore this uncanny sense of simultaneous belonging and non-belonging, through photographing the next generation of young people living here, and the landscape they inhabit, as a way to picture what home might mean to me now. — Harry Culy
Mirror City is a deeply personal and lyrical exploration of Harry Culy’s hometown, Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington. Made between 2018-2022, the photographs in this book wander through a nondescript urban landscape, recording scenes that oscillate between the mysterious and mundane. Enigmatic graffiti, tangled vines and wires, cracked glass, boarded-up doorways and portraits of the young people who live here: these moments are punctuated with private iPhone notes and observations, domestic reminders, and lists. Arranged in sequence, the photographs and text in this book form a dreamlike narrative that rejects any sort of definitive conclusion. It instead looks for patterns and rhythms that may echo the fragility of belonging, and the uncertain future facing us.
100 pages, 20.2 x 25 cm, linen hardcover, Bad News Books (Te Whanganui-a-Tara).