Returning

In 2025 Auckland photographer Yvonne Shaw invited me to write an essay for her book Gestures and Relations.

Returning: Some thoughts on Yvonne Shaw’s Gestures and Relations

As I write this I am sitting in the lounge of the house I grew up in, I could stand up right now and walk up the stairs into the room which was my childhood bedroom. It is a little over thirty years since I left home and my parents still live here. Memory is a funny thing, the way we turn it over and over, like a dog tamping down the grass before it lies down. This is my childhood home, but after thirty years of regular revisiting, new experiences, and seeing all the people who populated my childhood ageing alongside me, is it really the same house? Certainly that bedroom is no longer my childhood space, and I am no longer that child. Returning and re-living are often described as negative actions; trauma becomes PTSD when we can’t control the memories that overwhelm our nervous systems. Yet therapy is also a type of re-living, of remembering, of reframing and retelling. Turning our memories over in our hands until we have smoothed the rough edges into a shape we feel comfortable to hold. In Yvonne Shaw’s Gestures and Relations we see groups engaging in psychodrama, a form of group therapy in which people explore significant moments, relationships and social systems through dramatic enactments. Interior rumination can feel endless, perhaps external enacting can help place a full stop?

Photography at its most interesting is a paradox. At once both wildly literal and deeply metaphorical, both in the same fraction of a moment. What a photograph is of, and what it is about are often two very different things. The same could also be said for therapy, that there are two layers to the work; the upper layer where words are spoken, and the underneath where new neural pathways are strengthened in the brain. After some time we look back and realise we are different than we were, different in the world. I wonder, what does trauma look like? And what does it look like when it leaves? How can photography, a medium so tied to the physicality of matter, capture something so ethereal?

Shaw has photographed psychodrama groups in five different locations which range from what appears to be someone’s home, through community spaces, to theatres. Sometimes we can see the lighting equipment the photographer is using to illuminate the scene. In most spaces there are chairs and pillows for the participants to use as props, and in the corner of one image I see a box of tissues. The props and lighting have the effect of making Shaw’s photographs seem to sit in the realm of the photographic tableau, and this is partly true. However while Shaw has commissioned the overall event she has not directed the action in any way. These images reference the photographic tropes of the tableau, of the stage and of the movie set, but they are more complex than that.

There are multiple layers being enacted here. Shaw is the documentarian, capturing the action as it unfolds in front of her. But unlike traditional documentary practice where the presence of the photographer is not usually acknowledged, Shaw has brought her own photographic apparatus into the photograph. The presence of photographer and lighting equipment by necessity changes the space for both the participants in the psychodrama and the audience of the photographs. She also presents multiple images from a single session, the action playing out in front of us across several frames with strong references to storyboarding for film, or graphic novels. So what are we to make of these images? Tableau, document, or storyboard? Some combination of all three? The photography here reflects the thing being photographed; not simply therapy, or theatre, or support group, but a combination of all of them. Gestures and Relations reminds us that the way photography captures human experience as it plays out in contemporary society is complex and nuanced, revealing the apparatus of photography alongside the mechanisms of the therapy.

As I encounter these photographs I am struck by the openness of the participants in the psychodrama who have generously offered something intimate and interior to the photographer. I have my own experiences of therapy, and I can’t think of a situation in which I’d less like to have my photograph taken. Except perhaps at the hairdresser. But I am reminded of a friend who recounted an experience of commissioning a photographer to make her portrait soon after her divorce, “I wanted to remember my sadness” she told me. I look at this work and I see a similar kind of bravery, of wanting to face towards life’s harder moments, not turn away from them. These are ordinary people, who come together to be helped, certainly, but also to be of service and help others. The group element is important, the action these people are taking is an enacting of generosity towards other human beings. I imagine they gain as much from the giving as from the receiving and that gratifies me.

In the end though all I can do is imagine. As much as these photographs are a record of a deeply personal encounter, they don’t really give anything away. We don’t know who the participants are, we have no understanding of the narratives they are enacting, not even which of them is director or protagonist in each drama. We have almost no knowledge of what passed between these people other than a posture or an anguished glance. And this perhaps is photography’s greatest magic trick; what it promises versus what it delivers. It promises us the whole world, increasingly the whole universe, laid out before us in a visual symphony of colour, texture and detail. But how much does knowing what something looks like really help? How much do we actually understand? How often do we look at a photograph and see all the detail without gaining any real understanding of either the context, or the reality of what we are seeing?

And so, while on the surface my childhood home may look much the same, too much has happened in the intervening years for this to be the same place. Despite the physical similarities, this place is fundamentally different to me. It has changed because I have changed, because everybody here has changed. Gestures and Relations shows us what it looks like when our internal worlds become external, but only an individual experiencing it in their own body knows how that feels, knows what it is to change. Despite the sombre tone of the imagery the final thing this book leaves me with is hope; for the individuals in these photographs and their ongoing healing, for the capacity of therapy to make the unbearable tolerable, and for photography, and its capacity to keep surprising me in the myriad ways it engages with the world.

Caroline McQuarrie