NZ Visual Diary - entry 323

Rawene Pharmacy

In most countries, and certainly amongst the advanced industrialised countries, there’s a sharp visual contrast between the built environments of urban and rural regions. The glittery glamour of fashionable urban centres recedes as one leaves metropolitan areas and heads towards the less populated and affluent regions of a given country.

Across New Zealand differences in the relative wealth between urban and rural centres is an insufficient explanation, in my opinion, for the stark variation in the cosmetic appeal of the new and shiny. The impulse to spend large amounts of money on the visual improvement of home or commercial establishment remains rather muted most everywhere. Haute fashion, be it clothing or home and business decor (inside and out), exists, but mostly at the margins, as the exception to a pronounced impulse that ‘understated’ is, as it were, de rigueur.

Understatement is a Kiwi thing, except in the way that some money, especially new money, can lead to punctuated displays of sparkling things.

And so it is with the chemist shop in Rawene. I admit that my colour version of this photograph is more lively, but only in the way that colour often serves in photographs as eye candy. There’s no pretence, no peacocks strutting about, in Rawene. That said, joy and colour abound, but they are spoken in whispers.