What it is to witness, with love and responsibility, with a camera … that is my enduring curiosity.   
–  Fiona Pardington, email correspondence in preparation for this exhibition, June 2026

Photography is often thought of as a way of capturing, of knowing the world. A medium used to observe, record, document, classify and preserve. Yet for Fiona Pardington (b. 1961, Kāi Tahu, Kāti Māmoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht), photography begins elsewhere. Reflecting on her early discomfort with documentary photography – and specifically portraiture – she recalls asking herself a seemingly simple question: Who is being violated in the name of seeing? Encountering Pardington’s photographs therefore means encountering a particular ethics of looking – or rather, an ethics of distance. Instead of only asking what we see, her images address how we see. Pardington disrupts habits through which objects, bodies or histories have been made readily available for classification or consumption. What has been rendered an artefact (re)appears as irreducible: not an object to be understood or consumed, but a presence treated with dignity and insisting on a different kind of encounter.

The exhibition’s title, To See a Face, suggests that ‘seeing’ becomes ethical precisely when an other cannot be reduced to an example, a specimen or an image. The assembled works repeatedly ask what photography might become once it relinquishes the ambition to possess its subjects, and another kind of relation becomes possible: a witnessing with love and responsibility.

Opening as Pardington's acclaimed presentation Taharaki Skyside, at the 2026 Venice Biennale, draws to a close, To See a Face offers audiences a timely opportunity to experience a major selection of her work in Aotearoa.

Image Credit: A86698, 2019 (detail). Courtesy of the Artist.