In Marti Friedlander’s 1979 black-and-white photograph, Ralph Hotere stands in front of a wooden fence outside his Port Chalmers studio holding a lit cigarette from which the ash has yet to fall, as if he’s been standing there a long time. With his beard and long hair, his black wool jersey, the punctuation point of his roll-your-own held close to his face, he has the aura of a jazz musician, a beatnik, an existentialist confronting the void, or else the air of an alert raptor eyeing far-off prey from his eyrie atop Observation Point. In the photographer’s presentation, the heroic, victorious advance of the modernist artist in the twentieth century is being acknowledged. Hotere’s measured pose might testify to his ability as an artist to astonish, seduce, convince, even as…