Bleak House II

<sup>Part of a series taken with the backdrop of the former High Court in Wellington, N.Z. It has been abandoned for years but is now being refurbished. In a few months it will have lost all its charm and have become the Supreme Court of New Zealand, so we had to capture it while it lasted.

Logistically the shoot was a nightmare - it had been raining intermittently all day and started again just as we started shooting. Chiffon doesn't agree with water, *thomasina had to perch in doorways where it was dry. The most substantial editing on these pictures was removing the pile of shoes and clothes! The cameras didn't agree with being soaked either, but I think the 30 year-old OM-1 can handle it.</sup>

These two photos were named after the Charles Dickens novel, about how destructive the Victorian court system was (where some cases cost £150,000 in Victorian currency). She reminds us of someone made destitute by the court, perhaps:

This is the Court of Chancery, which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire, which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners who would not give—who does not often give—the warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"