Jane Phare talks to Kiwi photographer Jane Ussher about why her latest project, ‘Olveston, Portrait of a Home’, is more of a tribute to a slice of New Zealand history than a coffee-table book.
Jane Ussher is used to being patient. Good photography can’t be rushed and then there are those empty minutes during long exposures. It is during those minutes that Ussher lets her mind wander, asking questions about what she’s seeing.
How did the family who built the beautiful mansion high on a Dunedin hill live? On what journey to far-flung countries did they buy those artefacts? Who helped the family with the remarkably bold interior decorating of the home they named Olveston?
Ussher pondered similar personal questions during the weeks she spent in Antarctica, meticulously photographing the contents of the huts used by Sir Ernest Shackleton and his men (built 1907/1908) and Captain Robert Falcon Scott (1911).
In Scott’s hut, waiting for long exposures, she wondered about the owner of a pair of cufflinks, “beautiful” dress shoes and a grosgrain ribbon used to tie a bowtie. It was a question tinged with sadness knowing that Scott and four of his men perished on the ice.
“I would think ‘what would that man have been thinking when he was packing his trunk? Where did he think he was going to be wearing those shoes, those cufflinks?’”
Frozen in time, too, is Dunedin’s Olveston, built between 1904 and 1907 for Dunedin businessman David Theomin, his wife Marie and their two children Edward and Dorothy. After Edward died, childless, in 1928 the house passed to Dorothy where she lived until her death in 1966. She left the house and its contents to the City of Dunedin, largely untouched since her parents had lived there.
It is that preservation, in its original state, that makes the stately home so remarkable. Inside its stately rooms are more than 8780 items that the family collected, admired and used: artwork, furniture, Persian rugs, fabrics, artefacts and souvenirs, silver, china, crystal and Murano glass, light fittings and chandeliers, Japanese weapons, marble and bronze statues, tapestries, wall hangings, clocks, kitchen utensils and personal items.
Read more at the New Zealand Herald here.
