From Within is an ongoing series of nocturnal photographs made across Auckland, Aotearoa.
The series looks closely at life growing up in Auckland, particularly in South Auckland, home to large Pasifika and MÄori communities.
Through houses, roads, lit windows, fences, and domestic interiors, the work examines the distance between homes that exist within the same city and the lives held behind them, both as a place of belonging and as a place of distance.
Growing up in South Auckland, from a young age I was used to seeing things that many Aucklanders are able to overlook. Some of my friends lived in conditions that were not ideal, in homes that today would be unlikely to pass a Healthy Homes test. I was lucky; the house I went home to could, at least, be called safe. But I was constantly in and out of those homes, and over time those scenes simply became normal to me, the everyday backdrop of where I was from.
As I got older, I began to travel beyond South Auckland, and I found myself struck by homes in wealthier areas, by the character they held, so unlike anything I had grown up around. Rather than pulling me away, that distance did the opposite. It deepened my feeling for where I came from. I slowly came to understand that the house you grow up in is as much a part of who you are as anything else you carry with you.
A house becomes a home, and what happens behind its doors stays private, always, in some way unknowable from the outside. I try to photograph these places without mystifying them, without making light of hardship, and without reducing it to spectacle. I look as honestly as I can: as someone of this place, not a visitor to it.
About Jordan Potae
Jordan Potae is a New Zealand-based photographer from South Auckland, Aotearoa. His work focuses on light, domestic interiors, suburban spaces, and ordinary structures. Through houses, roads, empty rooms, and illuminated windows, he examines memory, absence, class, and the private lives held behind closed doors.
