Yvonne Todd wanted to do glamorous big-budget commercial photography when she trained at Unitec in Auckland in the early 1990s, but her career didn't develop that way.
"I wasn't very good at it because I wasn't able to realise other people's dreams," she says.
"I wasn't very good at interpreting briefs and I realised early on I was better off making work for myself. I'm quite relieved, but I do borrow from that world of quite slickly produced imagery - but I use it in a way that translates into art practice."
Her exhibition, "Wall of Seahorsel", is one of Dunedin Public Art Gallery's offerings for the upcoming Otago Festival of the Arts.
The exhibition, which opened at the weekend, shows two series of photographs, Wall of Man (2009) and Seahorsel (2011).
Previously, Todd's work dealt with female portraits, showing a sort of constructed glamour and artificial beauty, so she wanted to do something different with male portraits, she says.
She started looking for male accountants to photograph, having grown up in an accountant family, but they didn't translate physically to what she had in mind.
"I decided I'd invent my own series of male executives based on corporate portraiture which I'd been studying. There are always specific things photographers do in the corporate portrait, such as back-lighting, so I kind of distilled all that."
However, Todd was also interested in how photography can orchestrate the emotional subtext within straightforward imagery.
She advertised for models in her local paper, hoping they would turn out to look like John Forsythe, who played Blake Carrington in Dynasty.
"When I met them, I realised I wasn't getting any Blake Carringtons, but it didn't matter. It was more about the rapport with the various people I met, and I figured I could transform them anyway with business clothing so they didn't necessarily have to be ruggedly handsome soap opera stars.
It was OK they were normal because it made it feel more realistic."
She wanted them to portray a paternal sense of fatherly love but also appear resolute and authoritarian.
"I really like that strange combination of benevolence but also intimidation, showing experience and trust. Then I was thinking, can anyone truly be infallible? These portraits set out to make someone look infallible and entirely trustworthy."
She so enjoyed making her first work in this genre, Founding CEO, which is in the DPAG collection, that she decided to continue with a series, "Wall of Man".
Each portrait has a title suggesting a back-story, such as Chief Financial Officer, Sales Executive or Company Founder.
"Titles are really important. Words can be used in powerful ways, but the most fun was coming up with the title, because it meant they had a definitive identity. Some of them didn't suit being from the corporate environment, so they have medical titles. The agrochemical spokesman just looked wrong in a shirt and tie so we unbuttoned the shirt a bit and we had this relaxed look, so I thought he could be an agrochemical spokesman - he looked more grass-roots."
Todd works with a 5x4 view camera, a large instrument that requires a tripod, a studio and a black cloth over the back and head of the photographer, and she shoots on transparency film.
The viewfinder shows the image upside down and back to front, which is probably good for left brain-right brain communication, she says with a laugh.
"It doesn't lend itself to a wildly freestyle type of shooting. It's quite a restrained and meticulous process," she says. However, Todd has used it for 12 years and likes the large-format film, as it enables a large print to retain fine, crisp detail.
"The skin is so crisply rendered, especially in the older men. You can see those age spots and skin flakes.
They haven't been smoothed over.
You could retouch them but there's a slightly harsh element in that everything's there. It hasn't been manipulated in post-production."
Todd says Seahorsel was a radical departure from her earlier portraits.
"I wanted to produce a series that had scope for experimentation. The idea of having dance moves, basing it on poses and posture, opened up a range of possibilities, and the fact they are a sort of imagined community and have been brought together for some reason.
"I like the fact it's totally indeterminable, ambiguous, about scrambled frequencies and an element of nonsense, but there's a purpose in the actions as well."
She was inspired by Richard Averdon's high-energy fashion photography, Martha Graham's dance photographs and mime artist Marcel Marceau, and included beach detritus such as seaweed, shells and sand to give it a sense of cohesion but also keep it nonsensical, she says.
"I started with a few ideas, but it was really when I started shooting that it began to take shape. With that series I didn't really know what I would end up with. It evolved in a way that I couldn't have predicted. It's generally the costume and the model that are the starting point, and what they do.
"Because it's in a studio environment, there's not a lot to hide behind. It's like flying blind. Not all the shoots work out. Most of them do but some of them don't for reasons that are not necessarily easy to define - the emotional response isn't there, or you just look at the work flatly and don't really know what to think or it's underwhelming."
Todd is always looking for an element of surprise to creep in, perhaps humour or something slightly off, or a sense of unease.
She aims to produce images the viewer wants to keep looking at, that offer something new each time, and that have an indefinable, magical something, she says.
"I think the fact that I'm not a commercial photographer doing advertising imagery, there has to be some sort of edge to the work. Basically, I'm trying to show the world as I see it."
See it
Yvonne Todd: "Wall of Seahorsel" is at Dunedin Public Art Gallery, as part of the Otago Festival of the Arts, until February 17, 2013.
