175 years of photography in Aotearoa
NEW ZEALAND PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTED
PHOTOGRAPHY
NEW ZEALAND
PHOTOGRAPHY COLLECTED
Athol McCredie
photographers, who in theory operate under no such constraints, take their images in remarkably formulaic and purposeful ways: from family gatherings and birthday parties to holiday snaps and tourist sights. Look through any photographic archive and there are notably few photographs of people engaged in everyday activities such as brushing their teeth, washing the dishes, driving their car, sitting in an office. Photography is no ‘eye of God’, everywhere present despite the camera, in the form of the smartphone, now being so.
Museum photography collections do not stand outside history. Like photography itself, they can only represent or illustrate the past in limited ways, and this makes them contingent, idiosyncratic and partial. They are shaped by museum policy, staff interests, public perceptions and chance events. And some photographs, due to their perceived lack of public interest or value, rarely make it into museum collections at all. Public collections seldom acquire pornography, for example, despite it being a use to which photography has been put since its earliest days.6 Technical, medical and police photography are also largely absent.
For these reasons, New Zealand Photography Collected does not aim to tell a ‘complete’ history of photography in this country. It responds instead to a call by photo historian Geoffrey Batchen for histories about photography rather than of photography.7 Histories of photography tend to base themselves on the model of art history. A linear progression of styles, developed by a series of exemplary practitioners and images, is constructed, and artist status is imposed on many workaday photographers of the past. Such histories are abstract, concerned with images rather than physical photographs and how they are used and consumed in the real world. Histories about photography, on the other hand, deal with questions of production, reproduction, dissemination and collection. They consider not only how photographs operate in their time but also how they operate through time how their meanings change and multiply. This book is structured into chapters that reflect, broadly, why the photographs were made in the first place and some of the reasons they were then collected. It shows one way a history about photography can begin to look.
Left:
Unknown photographer
Southern Cross, Wellington, 1956
Postcard, offset lithograph, 92 × 142 mm
Private collection
Below:
Unknown photographer
Untitled, c.1910
Postcard, Woodburytype
Purchased 1996, PS.000448
Opposite:
Berry & Co
Mrs Robinshaw, c.1905
Gelatin glass negative, half plate
Purchased 1998 with New Zealand
Lottery Grants Board funds, B.044433
Algernon Gifford
Down Deep Cove, early morning, c.1895
Hand-coloured glass lantern slide, 80 × 80 mm
Gift of Mrs Murray, 1967, LS.005456
Oakley Studios or Crown Studios
New Plymouth High School Old Boys surf team, 1926
Gelatin glass negative, whole plate
FB Butler / Crown Studios Collection.
Gift of Frederick B Butler, 1972, C.003397
Chapter 1, ‘How we looked’, features studio portraits and snapshots of people. These are the photographs we take and accumulate of ourselves, our families and friends. Part of the motivation for taking such photographs is as a hedge against forgetting. Paradoxically, they are also easily forgotten. Once a person has passed from living memory, their photographs lose meaning, become mute. As family interest fades, such images often end up in a museum. Here in volume, and across many individuals and families patterns become clear. We see what sort of clothes people wore at a certain point in time, how they presented themselves in poses, the photographic techniques used, and what they did with the photographs. Where an individual might accumulate a composite family portrait from photographs, a museum assembles something approaching a national portrait, a catalogue of society. A coded set of private meanings is replaced by new, public readings.
Chapter 2, ‘Being there’, looks at the phenomenon of the ‘view’: from its origins in nineteenth-century landscape photography to its later expression in postcards and glossy publications. We consume these to bring what is remote close to hand: if we cannot easily visit Fiordland’s spectacular scenery, for example, we can experience it vicariously via book, magazine and website photographs; and if an event does not happen in our neighbourhood, we can see photographs of it in a newspaper or online. Photographs of such subjects operate the same way in a museum collection, but here the distance is not so much in space as in time. By collecting these photographs we can see how a place or event looked in the past. Unlike portraits in museum collections, most places and events are identified, and it is their specifics museums are more interested in than their general qualities.
Photographs of people, places and events combine in chapter 3, ‘Belonging and aspiring’. Here it is not any of these in isolation, but how they operate, often together, to help form social identities. We acquire and display group photographs of ourselves in clubs, sports teams and school classes, on tramping trips or at workplace functions that help define who we are. We also consume advertising images that propose who we could be, if only we drank the right soft drink, bought the right clothes or drove the right car. Again, by assembling such images in volume, and applying the perspective of time, such images lose their individual character and allow museums to reveal how we thought about ourselves at a collective level.
Museums do not simply collect photographs; they also create them. Chapter 4, ‘Pursuing knowledge’, presents a range of photographs originally taken for scientific, research or documentation purposes, which have gained new significance with the passage of time. In the case of the Dominion Museum, for example, the identities of two men pictured demonstrating tukutuku weaving in the 1923 photograph overleaf were incidental: the photograph was taken by a staff member as an ethnographic record, to document a technique. The men are in fact Te Rangihīroa (Peter Buck) and Āpirana Ngata two leaders of the 1920s renaissance in Māori culture who were both later knighted for their services to Māoridom. Today, we understand the photograph as documenting a significant moment in Māori development and for this reason approaching the status of taonga, or cultural treasure itself. Photographs like this suggest that the meaning of an image can change not only when it enters a collection but also during its time within the collection.
A contemporary photography movement emerged in Aotearoa in the late 1960s, and the National Art Gallery began collecting in this field in 1976. When the gallery merged with the National Museum to form Te Papa in 1992, Te Papa inherited this body of contemporary work examples of which appear in chapters 6 and 7.8 Chapter 5, ‘Conceiving a photographic art’, presents the historical backstory of the contemporary
Before photography, painted portraits were used to create a permanent likeness, but their expense limited them to the well-of. Silhouettes and miniature portraits were cheap, popular alternatives to a full-sized canvas, but they yielded only approximate resemblances. When the new medium of photography was announced in Paris in 1839 it ofered a chance to circumvent the artist’s hand: via the camera’s mechanical eye, light and chemistry could now draw a likeness with unprecedented truth and accuracy.
From this moment, the French poet Baudelaire scathingly commented, ‘our loathsome society rushed, like Narcissus, to contemplate its trivial image on a metallic plate’.1 Of all the possible subjects in the world, people overwhelmingly wanted to see themselves, preferring the magical-seeming truth of photography to the artist’s flattery. An estimated 95 percent of daguerreotypes the first photographic process made public were taken as portraits. 2
The daguerreotype rendered a photographic image on a polished, silver-plated sheet of copper, giving rise to the phrase ‘the mirror with a memory’.3 The shiny, reflective surface made the image itself difficult to see, but this drawback did not inhibit rapid adoption of the new technology. For fifteen years, the small, jewel-like daguerreotype would be the principal form of photography in most parts of the world.
Daguerreotypes were probably not made in Aotearoa before 1848, and even after that they were only produced in low numbers. The process was difficult and expensive, with much practice needed before a photographer could get a good result. Its use was mainly limited to professionals, since they could recoup their costs from customers. But the small market in this country for such images worked against anyone trying to make a livelihood as a daguerreotypist.4 The colony’s fledgling European settlements supported a mere handful of itinerant photographers.
Few daguerreotypes can be positively identified as taken in Aotearoa because there was no easy way for photographers to record their name or the sitter’s identity on the photograph or its case.5 Like the daguerreotype’s cheaper and more common successor, the ambrotype, most were probably brought here by new immigrants or sent out later by family who had remained behind. Those produced in Aotearoa were often sent to relatives back ‘home’.6 The effect of this two-way movement is that only some of the early photographic portraits found in Aotearoa today are likely to have been made here. It also suggests that, counter to Baudelaire’s disdainful claim, many people were having photographs taken not so much so as to gaze upon themselves, but as mementoes for others: for loved ones living on the other side of the world.
The next technological development in portrait photography was the carte-de-visite. From the 1860s onwards, these tiny photographs were also shuffled around the globe even more so than earlier forms of photography. But because cartes-de-visite were hugely popular, the craze for them has left a substantial body of photographs of New Zealanders in this country.
At around 102 × 62 mm, the carte-de-visite is only a little larger than the visiting card from which it took its name. Unlike the daguerreotype and ambrotype, it was cheap to produce and easy to replicate. The photograph was first taken on a glass negative, then as many copies as required printed on photographic paper. These were in turn pasted onto card. The carte-devisite’s small size meant it could be readily slipped into a letter destined for
Above:
Unknown photographer
Young woman holding a fan, c.1855
Hand-coloured daguerreotype
Purchased 2014, O.042681
Opposite, clockwise from top left:
EJ Halford
Boy in sailor-style suit, 1901–02
Cabinet card, gelatin silver print
O.005363
Wrigglesworth & Binns (Wellington)
Portrait of a young woman, 1880s
Carte-de-visite, albumen silver print
Purchased 1999 with New Zealand
Lottery Grants Board funds, O.021897
Unknown compiler
The colonial family album, 1880s
Photograph album, 310 × 256 × 70 mm (closed)
Purchased 2010, AL.000502
relatives abroad. Even so, the fact that a sender usually had several prints meant at least one often remained in Aotearoa.
Studio settings in early cartes are typically plain. Subjects commonly stand against a wall, with a curve of drapery to one side, a table or chair to rest a hand upon on the other. Painted backdrops were gradually introduced after the 1860s, and more furniture and decorations entered the frame. During a rustic phase in the late 1870s and into the 1880s, every prop seems to have been constructed from logs, branches or fake rocks. By the end of the century, pot plants, fur rugs, plant stands, screens and cushions on the floor created a lush environment for sitters. Vignetting the creation of a soft-edged oval halo around the sitter came into fashion as well, which meant a customer could choose to have the background eliminated entirely.
The carte-de-visite’s successor, the cabinet print, also made use of sumptuous studio settings and vignetting. These larger prints, measuring about 140 × 100 mm, drew on an array of new printing processes, from gelatin silver to sepia toning. Their often glossy finish and frequently more elaborate mount made the carte-de-visite look a rather humble affair in comparison. From the 1880s, they gradually supplanted the smaller form.
The small, slim nature of cartes-de-visite and their low cost enabled what was to become a key treatment and use of photography: the collection. Victorians gathered cartes and cabinet prints together in ornate, leatherbound albums and displayed them in parlour rooms as conversation pieces. Viewers could compare and connect images to produce visual narratives of family relationships from the pages of solemn faces and poses. Unlike today’s albums, few people were represented more than once, as having a portrait made was still a special occasion.
Rubbing shoulders with family members might be a few prominent figures of the time: royalty, politicians, military men, notable Māori and stage personalities. Printing technology did not allow photographs to be easily reproduced until the 1890s, except as engravings, but purchasing a carte allowed people to own a likeness of such luminaries. Now anyone with
George Crummer
Two women, c.1914
Gelatin glass negative, half plate
B.027758
George Crummer was born in New Zealand but lived in the Cook Islands from the early 1890s, where he married a Cook Island woman. He operated as a trader and photographer, and was also a bioscope
(cinema) operator for a time. He does not seem to have had a studio, as most of his portraits of locals are taken outdoors with improvised backgrounds. In this case, an assistant sits on top of a tivaevae quilt. His presence, the figure-ground pattern of the tivaevae, and the deterioration of the negative around its edges combine to create an inadvertent second image that competes with the portrait of the women.
Alfred Henderson
Wellington Physical Training School pupils.
Inscribed: Miss Sinclair, 1905–12
Gelatin glass negative, half plate
Purchased 1999 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds, B.079755
Double portraits of women posed closely together often appear in the photographic record. The sitters perhaps friends or sisters frequently wear the same clothes or have the same hairstyles, creating a doppelgänger impression. In this case,
there is an additional uncanny effect where the stripes on the outfits run together in the middle, suggesting a single dress covering melded bodies. The appearance is reinforced by the arm of the young woman at left doing double duty for both individuals in the centre. Visual ambiguities do not stop there: at right, in the background, the ornate frame of a mirror strangely fades away vertically. It is, of course, simply painted on the backdrop in a way designed to simulate our peripheral vision.
William Hart, Hart, Campbell & Co
Ballarat Street, Queenstown, NZ, flooded 1878
Collodion glass negative, whole plate
Purchased 1943, C.014174
Heavy rain and snowmelt in 1878 caused devastation along the length of the South Island’s Clutha River, and dramatically raised the level of Lake Wakatipu, seen in the background of this photograph. The Otago Daily Times observed men wading up to their chests in a bid to rescue articles of household furniture, while the lake lay ‘in smiling, mocking serenity, priding itself in its newly-acquired greatness’.12 Worse was to come, for when the water was at its height a wind sprang up that pounded waves against the buildings, causing some to collapse. Floating logs from a nearby timber yard hammered against walls, doors and windows, causing even greater destruction and, according to the Otago Daily Times reporter, sending ‘a pang of humiliating pain to the heart, to see how utterly futile are the works of man when opposed by the elements’.
Opposite: Fred Brockett
Turbulent sailing [wreck of La Bella], October 1904
Gelatin glass negative, half plate
Purchased 1957, B.027779
The steel-hulled sailing ship La Bella left Port Chalmers on 10 October 1904 bound for New Plymouth with a cargo of flour. But off Marlborough’s Cape Campbell, a strong southerly gale ripped its sails to shreds, leaving the ship at the mercy of the storm. The crew thought they would be blown right through Cook Strait, but, when daybreak came on 13 October, they saw a looming shoreline. Three anchors were dropped but all dragged, and the ship beached stern-first in Ōwhiro Bay before swinging around broadside to the waves. With most of Wellington’s south coast lined with rocks and the bay so small, the ship had a lucky escape. Seven days later, it was refloated and towed into Port Nicholson for repairs. An enquiry exonerated the captain and crew of any fault.
Ellis Dudgeon
Lake Hawea, c.1947
Hand-coloured gelatin silver print, coloured by Elaine Watson, 1962, 404 × 500 mm
Purchased 2023, O.051365
It is almost unknown for a hand-colourist to be identified on a photograph, but this one has a handwritten label on the back reading ‘Hand painted photograph by Elaine Watson, July 1962.’ This records that Watson hand-coloured it, not that she took it, for we know from a 1947 book in which it was reproduced in black and white that it was taken by Ellis Dudgeon, a photographer who ran a studio in Nelson from 1930 to 1970. Dudgeon’s scenic hand-coloured photographs were widely seen. Indeed, this image appears in colour on the cover of the upmarket magazine Mirror: New Zealand’s national home journal
in 1955. In that version, the colouring is quite different: there is much more yellow in the tī kouka (cabbage trees), there are red flowers on the bushes by the lakeside, and it is much brighter and sunnier throughout. It is a more upbeat, holiday image than Watson’s subdued and uniformly toned version, showing just how much interpretive room there was for colourists, who were rarely present when the photograph was taken.
Opposite:
National Publicity Studios
Mt Ngauruhoe National Park [sic], 1950s
Hand-coloured gelatin silver print, 376 × 300 mm Purchased 2011, O.037772
In 1924 the Department of Internal Affairs set up a Publicity Office to produce films, photographs
and printed material to promote the country to tourists and immigrants. At the end of the Second World War, the office split into the National Publicity Studios and the National Film Unit. National Publicity Studios (NPS) photographers travelled New Zealand looking for promotional images such as this hand-coloured mountain vista. Where Whites Aviation were taking photographs to sell as décor items, NPS were making their images to sell New Zealand. They typically focused on tourist attractions and aimed to present the country in the best light. There was apparently a list of guidelines for the photographers that included no photographs showing cars more than ten years old, no buildings with signs on them, and only depicting Māori who were ‘well dressed’ or wearing customary clothes.
James McDonald
New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion ‘Hui Aroha’, Gisborne, 1919
Gelatin glass negative, half plate MU000523/001/0001
In 1919, James McDonald travelled to Gisborne to photograph a hui to welcome home the surviving East Coast members of the New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion from the battlefields of the First World War. In this shot, the Dominion Museum photographer has gained the attention of many but not all of the crowd, capturing a wonderfully evocative mix of focused attention and distraction.
The war marked the first time that Māori and Pākehā had fought together on foreign soil; both suffered severe losses at Gallipoli. The Poverty Bay Herald called the event a ‘day of thanksgiving and a day of rejoicing’, in which ‘the Pakeha section of the community joined heartily with the Maori people in according the returning braves a fitting “welcome home” . . . Amidst all the cheers and all the excitement of rejoicing no one with a sympathetic heart could fail to be touched by the lamentations of the elders for those brave boys who will never return.’6
Gordon H Burt Ltd
Display advertisements for ‘Petone’ Quality Goods, c.1928
Gelatin glass negative, whole plate
Purchased 1999 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds, C.019291
In an era when New Zealanders mostly wore clothes manufactured in this country, and much of this was woollen, places like Petone, Kaiapoi, Roslyn and Mosgiel were also synonymous with their woollen mills. These in turn became used as brand names by the manufacturers.
Even swimsuits were made of wool. Until synthetics came on the market, wool was a better choice than the revealing wet T-shirt effect cotton
could produce. However, wool tended to sag and cling to the body when wet in more revealing ways than today’s swimwear.
The model in these display cut-outs looks more like an airbrush painting than a photograph, but small details suggest there is a real person underneath all the retouching the way she grasps the rope, the clearly photographic nature of the wooden bollard on which she sits, the dimples around her knees, and the untidy nature of the towel or scarf she seems to be holding in her upstretched hand.
Opposite:
Spencer Digby studio
Inscribed: Kirkcaldie’s, 1932
Sheet film copy negative, half plate
Spencer Digby / Ronald D Woolf Collection.
Gift of Ronald Woolf, 1975, B.084478
Spencer Digby studio
Wellington Cat Show, 10 June 1961
Roll film negative, 60 × 60 mm
Spencer Digby / Ronald D Woolf Collection.
Gift of Ronald Woolf, 1975, F.014897
Spencer Digby studio Persian cat, 1970
Roll film negative, 60 × 60 mm
Spencer Digby / Ronald D Woolf Collection.
Gift of Ronald Woolf, 1975, F.016389
Photographing cat shows was all part of the job for the Woolf family, who from 1960 ran the Wellington studio originally founded by Spencer Digby. Their negatives record large numbers of individual cats sitting in cages, but it is the photographs with people that are more interesting. They reveal not only how the competitions were social events, but also the relationships people had with their pets.
Opposite:
FR Lamb
Hay’s procession, Christchurch, 1956–57
Frame from stereo transparency pair, 11 × 12 mm
Purchased 2009, CT.058924
FR Lamb
Hay’s procession, Christchurch, 1956–57
Frame from stereo transparency pair, 11 × 12 mm
Purchased 2009, CT.058955
Christmas parades were begun by department stores in the 1930s as a way to announce the arrival of Santa Claus at their store. The parades became increasingly elaborate, with Santa accompanied by fairies, clowns and characters from nursery rhymes. Hay’s department store, a Christchurch institution for fifty years, began their parades in 1947. These were often photographed, though only rarely as stereo images for a View-Master disc like these shots.
KNOWLEDGE
4 PURSUING KNOWLEDGE
James McDonald
Making hinaki nets [Nikora Toitupu and TauTamakehu at Hiruhārama], 1921
Gelatin glass negative, half plate MU000523/005/0331
Opposite:
James McDonald
Mat takapau made by Mrs Pokai [Whanganui River ethnological expedition, Koroniti], 1921
Gelatin glass negative, half plate MU000523/005/0715
In 1921, James McDonald accompanied ethnologists Elsdon Best and Johannes Andersen on a three-week expedition up the Whanganui River to document Māori traditions. They filmed, photographed and made wax-cylinder sound recordings. At first they were treated with suspicion, for the notebooks that Best and Anderson used made some people think they were tax collectors. But when Te Rangihīroa joined the expedition to record weaving and eel fishing techniques, and spoke on the marae at Koriniti, fears were allayed, for he was well known as the former second-incommand of the Pioneer (Maori) Battalion and for his work in improving Māori health. Anderson wrote that they ‘received the keys of the city’ and were treated with ‘royal hospitality’ from this point on.8 In photographing weaving for Te Rangihīroa, McDonald found that he ‘got interested in kit weaving & mat making’ himself.9
Frank O’Leary
Pterodroma lessoni (white-headed petrel) found on Lyall Bay beach, Wellington underwing, 1960
Sheet film negative, 4 × 5 inches
MA_B.009826
Opposite: Augustus Hamilton
Amphiura arenaria [now Amphiura (Amphiura) aster], c.1913
Gelatin glass negative, whole plate
MA_C.000678
These two brittle stars were photographed under natural light over a hundred years ago
to accompany a published description of this species of echinoderm. One is shown right-side up, the lower one inverted; both have broken-off arms. The photographer, Augustus Hamilton, has carefully arranged the starfish to fit within the frame. The black background was chosen to provide sufficient contrast for them to stand out clearly in reproduction, which was of relatively poor quality at the time.
JT Salmon
Morning brilliance, c.1959
Gelatin silver print, 361 × 246 mm
Gift of Professor JT Salmon, 1983, O.003187
Photographs taken against the light became a pictorialist genre known as contre-jour (French for ‘against daylight’). It was tricky to pull off, but John T Salmon, a stalwart of the Wellington Camera Club from the 1930s to the 1950s, was a capable technical photographer: though his official role at the Dominion Museum was entomologist, he also served as its photographer. His classic book, Native Trees of New Zealand (1980), relied heavily on his careful colour photographs of plant specimens.
Opposite:
George Chance
Stately gums, NZ, 1930–31
Gelatin silver print, 258 × 205 mm
Purchased 1981 with Ellen Eames Collection funds, O.002735
This open, straightforward photograph is attractive for the way the soft light illuminates the tree trunks framed to one side in a classic pictorial composition. If it weren’t for similarly pictorialist giveaways such as the sepia tone, stippling and spreading shadows, the photograph could almost be mistaken for the work of the American modernist Ansel Adams or New Zealand’s own John Johns a celebration of light, tone and nature.
Richard Sharell
Magda Fischer, 1930s
Gelatin silver print, 305 × 245 mm
Purchased 1999 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds, O.019800
Opposite: Frank Hofmann
Lili Kraus II, 1946
Gelatin silver print by Justine Lord, 1989, 263 × 183 mm
Gift of the Frank Hofmann Estate, 2010, O.033238
PERSPECTIVES
6 OTHER PERSPECTIVES
Many, maybe all, photographs can be described as documentary. Snapshots document people and their activities; studio portraits document a person (and a studio); nineteenth-century city views document a place. But as a genre, documentary photography refers to work that is more self-consciously documentary than these. Its subject tends to be people and society (refected in the more precise term ‘social documentary’), and thus excludes most scientifc photography, as well as the nineteenthcentury views. Documentary photographers also typically focus on a coherent, identifed project — not just a photograph here and there and demonstrate a personal point of view, or even persuasive intent, leading to another refnement in terminology: personal documentary photography.
Early forms of documentary photography are usually traced to the nineteenth century. The entrepreneurial American photographer Mathew Brady, for example, employed a large team of photographers to cover the Civil War in the early 1860s. The battlefield carnage they captured shocked viewers, who had previously only been familiar with artists’ impressions. In the 1870s, John Thomson, fresh from photographing in China, treated the streets of London as equally foreign territory. He hoped that if the grim reality of the working-class poor who inhabited its dark alleyways were seen, efforts would be made to improve their lives. In the United States too, photographers used hard-hitting images to argue for better living and working conditions for the poor. They included Jacob Riis, who worked in New York in the 1880s, and Lewis Hine, who began documenting the lives of working people in the 1900s.
No New Zealand photography was so focused and deliberately documentary until the 1940s. Alfred Burton’s 1885 photographs of Whanganui/ King Country Māori, James McDonald’s field trips recording Māori culture in the early 1920s and Leslie Adkin’s photographs of the construction of the Mangahao hydroelectric dam, near Taitoko Levin, are all candidates. But none is as strong in personal or persuasive qualities as proto-documentary work from overseas.
In the 1920s, magazine photojournalism and documentary film began to emerge. These twin forces helped shift documentary photography towards becoming a field of practice with its own traditions and ideologies. Each immersed the viewer in the world of the subject through compelling composition, drama and defined storylines borrowing the techniques of both art and fiction film, along with some of their subjectivity. Their focus was typically the lives of others: people living in places geographically, culturally or socially remote from the audience. Like an explorer or anthropologist, the photographer or film-maker forayed into unfamiliar territory on behalf of viewers comfortable in their cinema seats or living room armchairs. Photojournalism of this sort emerged in Germany in the 1920s; by the 1930s, British magazines such as the Weekly Illustrated and Picture Post, and in the United States, Life, had established it in the English-speaking world. The word ‘essay’ was co-opted to describe photographic sequences: as for prose, a ‘photo essay’ implied an opinion piece, an argument. In film, Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is considered the earliest instance of documentary. Indeed, it was Flaherty’s subsequent film on Samoan life, Moana (1926), that prompted the critic John Grierson to devise the term.
Eric Lee-Johnson was one of the very first New Zealanders to be influenced by these new developments. Throughout the 1930s, he worked in London as a graphic designer; in 1938, the New Zealand magazines The Monocle and the Weekly News published two single-page stories featuring his photographs of life on and around the city’s streets. When Lee-Johnson returned to Pōneke Wellington in the same year, he took photographs of people in shops and on the street at night, but these were not published. Though he quietly continued to document life around him, a growing reputation as a painter meant he kept his photographic activity in the background for the rest of his life. As he put it, ‘In New Zealand of the mid-fifties, photography was not art, and I had no wish to be downgraded as a painter who had dabbled in this somewhat despised field.’1 Nonetheless, he regularly submitted his photographs to magazines such as New Zealand Farmer Weekly, New Zealand Free Lance and The Weekly News throughout the 1940s and 1950s, where they were usually published uncredited.
John Pascoe’s photographs documenting wartime Aotearoa in the first half of the 1940s found much more public exposure than LeeJohnson’s, and were more consistently produced. Pascoe was employed by the Department of Internal Affairs to publicise the war effort on the home front. His brief was so broad, however, that he followed his own interests much of the time. Pascoe may have been producing government propaganda, but his work was also personal and people-centred. He was a passionate advocate of the ordinary person, especially back-country folk, and disdained the ‘stuffed shirts’ and ‘red tape wallahs’ of officialdom.2 In 1947, Pascoe wrote what is probably the country’s first rallying cry for documentary photography:
Where are the documentary stories of the gold prospectors, the deer cullers, the growth of a dairy factory, the monotony of wharf labour, the discomfort of a miner’s calling, the adaptation of the Maori worker to city life and environment? In such subjects may lie the future of a valid contribution by photography to the course of our next decade.3
Above:
Eric Lee-Johnson
Wellington’s smallest newsboy, Cuba St, 1938
Gelatin silver print, 138 × 205 mm
Purchased 1997 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds, O.006586
John Pascoe
Ted Porter bringing in the mail at Manuka Point Station, and his son Bobby, 1943
Gelatin silver print by Athol McCredie, 1985, 190 × 195 mm
Purchased 1985 with New Zealand Lottery Board funds, O.003511
Opposite:
Lewis Hine
Spinner in New England mill, 1913
Gelatin silver print, 126 × 101 mm
George Eastman House, Rochester, NY, 1977:0181:0012
Les Cleveland may well have read Pascoe’s call to action; as a bush contractor on the West Coast of Te Waipounamu the South Island in the early 1950s, in between longer periods working as a journalist, he almost certainly would have been sympathetic to their sentiment. Like Pascoe, he was influenced by the photo essays featured in Life and Picture Post. But there were no outlets for true photojournalism in Aotearoa, aside from the short-lived magazine New Zealand Pictorial (1954–55), and Cleveland, speaking as a sometime bushman, felt he had to invent his own photographic form with ‘an axe and a saw’.4 His 1966 book, The Silent Land, integrated his photographs and a prose poem into a carefully considered, film-like narrative documenting the legacy of extractive industries on the coast.
Ans Westra also felt the influence of international photojournalism. Several years before the Netherlands-born photographer emigrated to Aotearoa, she saw the New York Museum of Modern Art’s famous 1955 exhibition The Family of Man. The exhibition was a call for unity underpinned by universal human values in the aftermath of the Second World War and the developing Cold War. Its humanist theme can be summed up by the title of another project, ‘People are people the world over’, a series of photo essays by the Magnum photo agency published in the American Ladies Home Journal six years earlier. The exhibition inspired Westra’s warm and sympathetic photographs of Māori in the 1960s, in which she captured human moments evoked through gesture and expression.
Vivian Street, Wellington, 1968
268 mm
Purchased 2004, O.028071
Opposite:
Willis Street, Wellington, 1969
174 mm
It is easy to imagine the camera as an invisible, all-seeing eye. But the reality of images like these is that they were taken by a young man, John Daley, who had practised over and again how to be unobtrusive. The reason for doing so, he said, was to ‘create a cross-section of a city community going about their life’:
I wasn’t trying to create great art or anything like that. I was just trying to document what was happening Really the rationale in many ways was that I was quite shy. I was an only
child of elderly parents and I really didn’t know very well how to relate to people. People were a curiosity to me. Photographing was my way of observing the world and working out how things ticked And of course, with the sort of photography I was doing, you can’t go up and say, ‘Oh, you are looking great, can you do that again so I can photograph it?’ You have to grab the moment and photograph it when it’s happening. And the bulk of the people never knew they were being photographed at all.11
John Daley
Gelatin silver print, 180 ×
John Daley
Gelatin silver print, 224 ×
Gift of John Daley, 2012, O.038890
Gary and Ruth Walker, 1978
Gelatin silver print, 240 × 290 mm
Purchased 1990, O.003891
Most social documentary photographers investigate social milieus distinct from their own. But Clive Stone decided to undertake a series on people living in an area where he grew up and where some of his family still resided the
Hibiscus Coast, a holiday destination just north of Auckland, from Whangaparāoa Peninsula to Ōrewa. These were people Stone described as ‘statistically average’ New Zealanders, except for the fact that they were subject to the community’s expectation that residents would keep up appearances for the annual influx of visitors.
Stone wrote that in any portrait session there is a tension between photographer and subject. Conventionally, the job and indeed skill of the
photographer is to put the sitter at ease. Stone chose instead to use this tension: ‘not deliberately playing it up,’ he said, ‘but accepting that it is there, and allowing it to manifest itself in the expression of a face, or the positioning of a body’.18 Doing so, he felt, imposed on his sitters the ‘burden of wondering how they were measuring up to the image they held of their community’ and whether their image was going to be consistent with everybody else’s.
Clive Stone
Edith Amituanai
Mr Manu, 2007, from the series ‘Déjeuner’ Inkjet print, 999 × 1000 mm Purchased 2019, O.048674
Carl Manu posed in his Canterbury Rugby Football Union jersey in his mother’s lounge before he went off to play professionally in Italy. He was part of what Samoan New Zealander Edith Amituanai describes as the third wave
of Pacific migration. The first was across the Pacific, the second to New Zealand during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s for jobs and a better life. Now people of Pacific heritage cross the world for an employment opportunity unimaginable to those of the second wave: professional sport.
This photograph is not documentary in the sense of life caught on the hop. Amituanai probably instructed Manu to wear his playing uniform and chose to shoot him from a low angle with a camera flash, giving him prominence in front of the busy
background. The location of the altar-like fireplace was undoubtedly carefully selected too, with its team photographs charting Manu’s career, the declaration of family ties evident in the many surrounding photographs, and the set of encyclopaedias speaking of aspirations of betterment. The photograph pictures Carl Manu, but it also documents family ties, the new economy of sport, and migration the singular experience of our time
Fiona Clark
Geraldine at home, 1975
Inkjet print, printed 2002, 240 × 160 mm
Purchased 2016, O.043783
Fiona Clark
Ian/Geraldine at home, 1975
Inkjet print, printed c.2015, 243 × 162 mm
Purchased 2016, O.043430
Opposite:
Fiona Clark
Diana and Tiny Tina at Mojos, Auckland, 1975
Inkjet print, printed 2002, 242 × 163 mm
Purchased 2016, O.043781
Fiona Clark became involved in Auckland’s gay and transgender scene when she was studying photography at the Elam School of Fine Arts and working in coffee bars downtown. For Clark, the community where she ‘felt safe for the first time in my life’19 was the obvious choice of subject: ‘I didn’t see anything else to photograph There was no other option for me but to be true to who I was.’20
Clark took many of her photographs at Mojo’s, a club on the corner of Queen and Wakefield streets. For another young art student who visited, David Lyndon Brown, the performers at the club signified ‘bravery, dedication and defiance. They are men who have transformed themselves, recreated themselves, against all odds, into women. They have realised their own mythology.’21 Many of the people Clark photographed in the 1970s have since died, but where she could, she has photographed her subjects later in life: ‘As a photographer I think it’s so rich and beautiful. All the tragedy and joy are part of our culture, but it’s never seen that way, we don’t have a recognised visual history. It’s time it was celebrated.’22
If it sounds trite to say that we are surrounded by photographic imagery today, this is only because it is hard for us, collectively, to remember the situation in, say, 1960. It was half a lifetime before the internet; television had yet to be seen across the country; movies only screened at the theatre; and the front pages of daily newspapers consisted of classified advertisements. Photojournalism of significance was restricted to overseas magazines, and there were no photography books except those of the ‘beautiful New Zealand’ variety.
In the following decades, photographs became part of our everyday lives. It became increasingly difficult for photographers engaged in thinking carefully about how to use the camera to ignore the fact that whatever photographs they produced would exist amid a sea of other photographs. Rather than being read as original artistic expressions, they would be viewed as more or less already taken. As a result, much recent work has focused on photography itself as its subject matter. Yvonne Todd’s strangely ‘off’ portraits deal with the artifice of studio photography; Gavin Hipkins and Ava Seymour show what can happen when you combine seemingly incompatible images; Conor Clarke considers how we read photographs; and a whole school of photographers, including Laurence Aberhart, Mark Adams, Andrew Ross, Natalie Robertson and Chris Corson-Scott, use large-format film cameras in ways that draw on nineteenth-century practices.
In this environment, it is perhaps unsurprising that New Zealand photographers like Ben Cauchi, Joyce Campbell and Wayne Barrar have chosen to revive antique photographic processes. Their ambrotypes, daguerreotypes and platinum prints seem to seek refuge from present complexities by going back to a time when representing nature was an apparently direct and straightforward matter. They remind us of how photography was first experienced as a wondrous and mysterious medium causing us to think about it in a different way.
The adoption of obsolete processes and techniques is sometimes interpreted as a reaction against digital photography, for where the digital is ephemeral, virtual and multitudinous, these processes offer the permanence, materiality and uniqueness of the handmade. However, aside from a few notable exceptions, such as Lisa Reihana’s digital constructions, it is not as though there is a surfeit of fictional, computer-created work in contemporary photography. The reality is that most photographers using digital processes are using them much as they would analogue technology, or to heighten an effect created largely by analogue means such as Yvonne Todd’s use of subtle digital tweaking to enhance the hard-to-put-your-fingeron strangeness she achieves through pose and costume. Contemporary photographers may appreciate digital technology’s convenience and the greater control it offers over colour and tone but less to depar t from the world than to reproduce it with greater fidelity. Digital technology has enabled large-scale prints to be made more cheaply; exhibition colour prints are now regularly on a scale that was only rarely seen in the 1970s or 1980s. Digital processes have also facilitated an explosion, internationally, in the number of photographic monographs due to the cost savings they have introduced to book production.
Books also include the photobook a term that came into use around the year 2000, and described the photographic equivalent of an artist’s book. It was often handmade, produced in small print runs, had little text and functioned as an artwork in itself, rather than as a book that reproduces photographs. Photobooks have boomed in recent years, becoming a field of practice in their own right. One explanation for this is that digital technologies make it cheap and easy for anyone to produce their own book. And like
Above:
Yuki Kihara
My Samoa girl, 2004–05
Chromogenic print, 805 × 605 mm
Gift of Yuki Kihara, 2009, O.033243
Opposite:
Sheryl Campbell
Droplet, 2020
Self-published photobook, 242 × 187 × 13 mm
Purchased 2023, RB001442
Lisa Reihana
Marakihau, 2001
Chromogenic print, 1990 × 1190 mm
Purchased 2002, O.026797
anachronistic photographic technologies, photobooks offer an alternative to the digital in the form of physical, crafted, personal objects much as vinyl records contrast with streaming. In these respects, photobooks seem like a shift back to the 1970s small-scale, intimate, handmade and sold through a cottage industry of distributors rather than bookshops or dealer galleries.
The real significance of photobooks, though, may be that they allow for the ordering of images. Photography has always been produced in volume (never more so than in the digital age), and gathered together in collections that are ordered in some way, as outlined at the beginning of this book. As photography writer and curator David Campany said, ‘ “Composition” is not confined to the rectangle of the viewfinder; it is also a matter of the composition of the set, series, suite, typology, archive, album, sequence, slideshow, story and so forth.’ 7 For contemporary photographers, exhibitions offer opportunities to order their work, but books go further by imposing a sequence, allowing a narrative to be built from apparently unrelated and meaningless single images. The whole can be greater than the sum of its parts, making the photobook an entirely new form of photographic expression.
In addition to the forces shaping contemporary New Zealand photography, which have come from within the medium over the last fifty years, there has been a huge growth in art-world infrastructure and support, though it is too early to assess its effects exactly. Contemporary photography has been substantially accepted into the art world, shown by dealer and public galleries, bought by public and private collectors, taught extensively in tertiary institutions, and accepted for awards, grants and artists’ residencies. Now seen as artists, many leading photographers hold teaching positions within academic institutions, and others have established careers that are as much outside this country courtesy of residencies, biennales and overseas dealers as within it. In all this, we see a diversity and volume of support and opportunity that did not exist half a century ago. There is a risk that due to desire for both novelty and spectacle on the one hand, and the security of a canon of star names on the other this infrastructure can become a closed, interlocking system. But the sheer quantity of work being produced and seen today promises that some photographers will evade the pressures of careerism and commercial success to teach us new things about the nature of the medium. Time will eventually expose the true shape of our present and reveal which photographs have lasting originality and meaning. The challenge, as always, for public collections is to try and divine this sooner rather than later.
Eric Lee-Johnson Reconnaissance of terra, Waimamaku, Northland, 1957
Gelatin silver print, 259 × 242 mm
Purchased 1997 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds, O.006101
Artist and photographer Eric Lee-Johnson began photographing the night sky at his Northland home of Waimamaku in 1956, using long exposures to capture star trails. In this image, he devised his own trails, instructing his son Peter to rotate two torches simultaneously at night while he held the camera shutter open. He also photographed their house at night and then sandwich-printed the
negatives, adding in several images of the moon for good measure.
In the same year, Lee-Johnson photographed the track of the first artificial satellite to orbit the Earth, the Soviet Sputnik I. In this Cold War era, there were political tensions over aerial spying by high-altitude aircraft. Although Sputnik did little more than emit radio beeps as it orbited the Earth, its ability to fly over any part of the Earth with impunity made it clear that a new era of surveillance from above would follow. Perhaps this is the meaning behind Lee-Johnson’s title Reconnaissance of terra
Gavin Hipkins
The sanctuary: Auckland (path), 2004
Gelatin silver print, 375 × 378 mm
Purchased 2007, O.031304
This baffling and unstable combination of abstraction and realism, surface and depth was made in the darkroom by laying a tangle of threaded, transparent sequins onto photographic paper while printing a negative of the bush pathway and frog. The fabric creates a photogram of white shadow that appears to sit on another plane entirely from the image of the three-dimensional world. We might try and reconcile the two images into one to create a visual narrative, reading the sequins
as a ghostly ectoplasmic presence from another realm made visible in the scene, say. The (magical) frog may be about to spring forward and gulp it down, or it could have burped it out into the world. We can alternatively consider the photogram as activating an otherwise ordinary depiction of the real world. This scene and the others Hipkins photographed for his ‘Sanctuary’ series are all of parks, gardens and similar publicly constructed places of tamed nature. When made strange by the inexplicable superimpositions, they speak of these sites as places from dreams, fairytales and other expressions of the subconscious.
Ava Seymour
The orange bathroom, 1995
Chromogenic print, 547 × 494 mm
Purchased 2002, O.027205
Are the pleasures of rubber against the skin all that different to those of owning a bathroom lined with swirling red marble and mirrors that reflect each other to infinity? Ava Seymour’s photograph balances between the bizarre and the plausible to ask us just that. Because photography tends
to work in genres, we can usually safely read its many varieties without getting tripped up. But by cutting and pasting a figure from a rubber fetish magazine into a page from a dated highend décor publication, Seymour has deliberately scrambled the signals. It is hard to think of two more unlikely sources of imagery to put together. In their new configuration, both find themselves undermined or, depending on your perspective, enhanced by the other.
Marie Shannon
The shark museum, 1992
Gelatin silver print, 378 × 441 mm
Purchased 2004, O.027310
The top half of Marie Shannon’s photograph is a potentially convincing depiction of a museum display, complete with numbered, wall-mounted specimens and spot lighting. But the pipe-cleaner figures and wonky rope barrier supported by matchsticks below conspire all too obviously to spoil the illusion. The construction has a naivety
that suggests a school project, recalling the sorts of things that stick in the mind from childhood visits to the museum.
Models, like photographs, represent the world with varying degrees of conviction. When combined, the two can pull in the same direction to create a convincing illusion a photograph of a model makes it look more persuasive by stripping it of context and rendering its scale ambiguous. But here The shark museum plays with illusion, reminding us of photography’s tendency to fictionalise.
ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHERS
Laurence Aberhart
Laurence Aberhart (1949–) is known for his black and white images of Masonic lodges, churches, marae, cemeteries and war memorials. These subjects speak of the past: of memory, mortality and melancholy. He captures each on a large-format camera mounted on a tripod, which he then prints as a contact print the same size as his huge 8 × 10-inch negatives. This technique, complete with long exposures, follows nineteenth-century practice, creating a resonance between Aberhart’s process and his history-laden subjects. He has had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, in 2002; a survey at the Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne, Australia, in 2005; and a major retrospective at City Gallery Wellington in 2007. The latter was accompanied by a substantial publication titled simply Aberhart. His more recent work, on First World War memorials in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, was published as ANZAC in 2014. Aberhart was made an Arts Foundation Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate in 2013.
Mark Adams
Born in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Mark Adams (1949–) graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in 1970, and has since developed a photographic practice focused on the people, land and histories of Aotearoa New Zealand. Adams’s body of work reflects a sustained engagement with postcolonial history and cultural practices, with subjects including Māori carving, Samoan tatau practice (published as Tatau in 2023 and earlier books in 2003 and 2010), and sites of historical significance, including those important to Ngāi Tahu (published as Land of Memories, 1993) and the landing places of Captain James Cook in the 1770s (published as Cook’s Sites: Revisiting history, 1999). In 2025, a survey exhibition of Adams’s work, Mark Adams: A survey | He kohinga whakaahua, was shown at Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki, accompanied by a substantial book with the same title.
Leslie Adkin
Leslie Adkin (1888–1964) was a gifted amateur scholar and polymath, publishing scientific papers in geology, exploring and mapping the Tararua Range, and researching the history of Māori occupation of the Horowhenua region all while running his farm at Taitoko Levin. He was also a passionate and prolific photographer, carrying a large, cumbersome camera on expeditions, and recording his social life in candid, ebullient images. Especially notable are the albums that celebrate his courtship, marriage and family life with Maud Herd. In 1946, Adkin moved to Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington, where, in the later years of his life, he worked for the New Zealand Geological Survey for nine years. At his death he left a collection of 7000 negatives, as well as diaries, albums, manuscripts, drawings and Māori artefacts. The negatives and diaries are in Te Papa’s collection, and his albums are split between Te Papa and the Alexander Turnbull Library.
JW Allen
James (or Joseph) Weaver Allen (1821–1886) was a photographer operating in Ōtepoti Dunedin from
1866 to at least 1871. After initially working as a grocer, Allen was trained in photography by Dunedin-based William Meluish and became a prominent topographical photographer as well as embracing the trend for cartes-de-visite. Allen died in Melbourne.
American Photographic Company
The American Photographic Company was established by John McGarrigle in the late 1860s on the corner of Queen Street and Wellesley Street East in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. McGarrigle capitalised on the craze for cartes-de-visite, producing small, affordable albumen prints of Māori. His images usually show his subjects in close-up, looking directly at the camera or just to the side, and they are among the most immediate early photographic portraits of Māori. In 1876, fire destroyed much of McGarrigle’s studio, and two years later he sold his remaining glass negatives to another Auckland company, Hayes & Mandeno, who in turn sold them to Burton Brothers of Ōtepoti Dunedin. McGarrigle sailed for Australia, where he briefly managed a drapery store in New South Wales, but he eventually returned to Aotearoa New Zealand and resumed his occupation as a photographer. Why McGarrigle called his former studio American Photographic Company is unclear he had no known links to the Americas. The studio’s 116 surviving negatives are held by Te Papa.
Edith Amituanai
Edith Amituanai MNZM (1980–) was born in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland to Samoan parents. She has a Master of Fine Arts from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland. Her early photography is characterised by scenes set in domestic spaces that frame the identities and interactions of her subjects. Amituanai has often turned her lens on her family and members of her West Auckland community to explore ideas of home and the interface between private and public space. In 2007, she was the inaugural recipient of the Marti Friedlander Photographic Award; in 2008, she became the first Pacific finalist of the prestigious Walters Prize for her exhibition Déjeuner, a series of photographs of professional rugby players living overseas and the family homes they left behind. In 2019, she had a survey exhibition at Adam Art Gallery Te Pātaka Toi that was accompanied by a substantial publication, Edith Amituanai: Double take
Thomas Andrew
Thomas Andrew (1855–1939) was born in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and operated a studio in Ahuriri Napier from c.1882 and then another in Tāmaki Makaurau. He visited Sāmoa on a tour of the Pacific aboard the schooner Southerly Buster in 1886–87 and took photographs in many other Pacific locations, including Niue, Nauru, and the Marshall, Caroline and Cook islands. In 1891, after his Tāmaki Makaurau studio burned down, he moved to Apia, Sāmoa where he became known for studio portraits and idyllic scenes of island life created for the tourist market. Andrew also documented significant historical events, including the volcanic eruption of Mount Matavanu, the funeral of writer Robert Louis Stevenson, and the Mau movement, which fought for Sāmoa’s political autonomy. His photographs were prized in Sāmoa
as a record of the local culture, and remain a valuable and fascinating resource today. Many of Andrew’s negatives have been lost, but surviving examples and many prints are held by Te Papa.
Gary Baigent
Gary Baigent (1941–) was born in Wakefield, Whakatū Nelson. He majored in painting at Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury from 1960 to 1962. After graduating from Auckland Teachers’ Training College in 1963, he worked in a succession of jobs in timber yards, on the railways and wharves, and in woolstores and paper stores. At the same time, he worked on The Unseen City (1967), a book documenting Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland’s urban life, which marks a watershed moment in contemporary New Zealand photography. In 1973, he was selected for the seminal publication and exhibition, Auckland City Art Gallery’s Three New Zealand Photographers: Gary Baigent, Richard Collins, John Fields. Baigent has worked as a trainee television camera operator, a gardener, farm worker, commercial diver, freelance yachting journalist and an assistant editor at SeaSpray magazine. His work was included in the Te Papa Press book The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers (2019).
Frank Giles Barker
Frank Giles Barker (1891–1955) was an architectural and industrial photographer operating from 1920 to 1955. He had a succession of studios in Pōneke Wellington city before working from his home address in 1936. He was contracted by the city’s council throughout the 1920s and 1930s to document engineering and construction projects such as the Western Access Scheme, a twenty-year series of works to improve access to the western suburbs. Barker was also an accomplished scenic photographer who produced postcards of the Te Whanganui-a-Tara Wellington and Te Matau-a-Māui Hawke’s Bay districts.
Wayne Barrar
Wayne Barrar (1957–) was born in Ōtautahi Christchurch and completed a degree in science at Canterbury University. He then studied fine art at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland, and design using photography at Wellington School of Design, Massey University. Barrar’s photographic practice draws on his scientific background, exploring the inter-relationship between nature and culture and human impacts on the landscape. His first major book on these themes was Shifting Nature (2001). In 2010, the exhibition Wayne Barrar: An expanding subterra, documented underground spaces that have been used as storage units, industrial parks, dwellings and tourism facilities. Torbay Tī Kōuka: A New Zealand tree in the English Riviera (2011) depicted the appropriation of the New Zealand cabbage tree, or tī kōuka, as the Torbay palm in South West England. His 2016 exhibition and publication, The Glass Archive, looked at the histories of creating, collecting and archiving microscope slides of diatom skeletons. Barrar is Honorary Research Fellow at Whiti o Rehua School of Art, Massey University, where he was formerly an associate professor.
Richard Barraud
Richard Barraud (1945–1988) was among a new wave of Aotearoa New Zealand photographers to use documentary as an expressive form. He studied photography and design at Wellington Poly-technic (now Massey University) from 1963 to 1966 and was, as a student, a prolific photographer, capturing the daily lives of his flatmates. A fully integrated observer of his subjects, his images from this time had a gritty immediacy far removed from the pictorial traditions of previous decades. Wellington Polytechnic School of Design tutor, William Main and American graphic designer David Graves, were influential, with their passions for photography and pop art respectively. Barraud died prematurely, and a posthumous exhibition, Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite: Richard Barraud, photography 1965–1975, was held at McNamara Gallery, Whanganui, in 2007. It showcased Barraud’s diverse practice that encompassed not just photography, but also painting, drawing, photomontage, collage and hand-lettering. Unfortunately, much of his work did not survive his bohemian and increasingly peripatetic life.
Janet Bayly
Janet Bayly (1955–) completed a Master of Fine Arts at Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1979 and has since enjoyed a career as a photographer, curator and museum director. In her photographic practice, Bayly has explored alternatives to conventional photography and been influenced by the moving image, painting and art history. Early in her career, she specialised in producing Polaroid SX-70 instant colour prints. Examples were included in the National Art Gallery’s 1982 touring exhibition and publication, Views/Exposures: 10 contemporary New Zealand photographers, and PhotoForum’s Six Women Photographers (1987). Bayly has been Director-Curator at Toi Mahara, the district gallery of the Kāpiti Coast, since 2006.
John Bell
John Bell (1846–1914) was born in Silton, Dorset. By 1881, he had a portrait studio in Frome, Somerset. In 1896, Bell advertised in the Western Gazette Almanac as a photographer with twenty-five years’ experience, with a new studio fitted with the best lighting, equipment and the ‘latest improvements’ in Hendford, near Yeovil, Somerset, for ‘the production of High-class Photography at Moderate Charges’. This was one of five of his branches. The others were in Shepton Mallet, Bath, Barry Docks and Trowbridge. Bell retired in 1911 and lived in Burnham-on-Sea until his death.
Berry & Co
Berry & Co was William Berry’s (1857–1949) photographic studio in Pōneke Wellington city. After working for the New Zealand Photographic Company for several years in the late nineteenth century, Berry acquired the company and established his first studio on Cuba Street in 1899. The following year, he commissioned the architect William Crichton to design a three-storey building to house his new photography studio and shop at 147 Cuba Street. The new premises opened in 1901, and here Berry took portraits of a wideranging clientele from bridal groups to First World
War servicemen. After Berry’s retirement in the mid1920s, the studio continued to operate under his name until late 1927. About 3200 surviving Berry negatives are held by Te Papa.
GW Bishop
George Wesley Bishop (c.1840–1887) arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand around 1863 and married in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland in 1866. He was later in the Te Kauaeranga Thames area from around 1868 to 1879. His photographs of the Thames goldfields were exhibited in the Vienna World Exhibition of 1873, but today he is known for his images of Māori. Bishop sold his studio in 1876 and became a chemist, first in Te Kauaeranga and then in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa Gisborne in late 1879. His life ended in San Francisco when he was shot by his partner.
Peter Black
From the mid-1970s Peter Black (1948–) has consistently practised in the mode of a street photographer, operating in public places. He began working in black and white, concentrating on framing and (often absurd) juxtaposition, showing how the camera sees differently from the human eye. Since 2007, he has worked exclusively in digital colour while continuing to draw attention to the public environment we all inhabit but mostly prefer not to examine too closely. He had a solo exhibition at the National Art Gallery in 1982, with an associated publication, Peter Black: Fifty photographs, and another at City Gallery Wellington in 2003, Peter Black: Real fiction, again with a catalogue of the same title. His more recent books include I Loved You From the Moment I Saw You (2011), The Grass is Awfully Green (2013), Frozen (2015), The Shops (2016), and Motel Life (2021).
Rhondda Bosworth
Rhondda Bosworth (1944–) graduated from Ilam School of Fine Arts, University of Canterbury in 1973, and from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland in 1980. Bosworth was one of the cohort of photographers associated with PhotoForum, and she responded to the rise of feminism in the 1970s with work that depicted the female body, often with a subtext suggesting psychological tension. Her personal experience has been central to her work, which responds to ‘the hegemony of the male world view’. In a series of stark, black-and-white studies, she depicted her own face and figure in poetic and sometimes disturbing images, which allude to issues of gender, memory and identity. Later, she began to tear and cut photographs and reassemble the fragments. More recently, she has photographed family papers and photographs, including the crumpled and frayed poems her father carried as a soldier in the Second World War. Since 2010, Bosworth has moved to digital photography, learning new printing technologies and, after decades of working in black and white, experimenting with richly saturated colour.
James Bragge
James Bragge (1833–1908) was born in England and moved to South Africa in 1854, where he learned the techniques of photography. By the mid-1860s, he had
settled in Pōneke Wellington city and established his own business. Bragge specialised in images of Pōneke, often returning to a favoured spot over several years and documenting the city’s development. In the 1870s, he ventured further afield and travelled through the Wairarapa, taking photographs along the way. These images, which often document the clearing of land and the building of roads, bridges and settlements, were collected in an acclaimed album titled Wellington to the Wairarapa. In 1879, the Wellington City Council commissioned Bragge to produce twenty-five photographs of local scenes for the Sydney International Exhibition, and these won an award against international competition. Later in life, Bragge concentrated on portrait photography, working from his studio on Manners Street and his home on Adelaide Road. Te Papa holds Bragge’s 169 surviving negatives and a similar number of prints.
Brian Brake
Brian Brake OBE (1927–1988) took up photography as a boy and in 1945 moved to Pōneke Wellington city to work for the portrait photographer Spencer Digby. In 1948, he joined the National Film Unit where he specialised in mountain documentaries. Arriving in England in 1954, he initially struggled to find work, but a turning point came when he joined the Parisbased photo agency Magnum. Brake travelled the world on assignment for Magnum and made two significant trips to China in the 1950s. He spent three months in India in 1960, photographing ‘Monsoon’, the photo-essay that established his international reputation. In the same year, he photographed ‘New Zealand, Gift of the Sea’, for National Geographic magazine, and in 1963, he turned this photo-essay into a best-selling book of the same name. At the end of the decade, he returned to making documentary films, and in 1976, settled in Titirangi, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, to concentrate on photographing for book projects. Brian Brake’s archive of negatives, transparencies and prints is held by Te Papa.
Stella Brennan
Stella Brennan (1974–) is a writer and sculptor living in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland. Her practice is diverse, and she is known for her interrogation of digital media. She co-founded the Aotearoa Digital Arts Network in 2002 and was co-editor of the Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader anthology (2008). Brennan’s work has been exhibited in numerous international galleries and festivals, including the Biennale of Sydney and the Liverpool Biennial, and she was a finalist in the 2006 Walters Prize for her installation Wet Social Sculpture an operating spa pool installed in an art gallery into which visitors were invited to immerse themselves.
In 2023, City Gallery Wellington Te Whare Toi staged Stella Brennan: Ancestor technologies, a survey exhibition of Brennan’s practice. Included in this was Brennan’s photographic installation Thread between darkness and light, drawing from her family archive of 120-year-old, glass-plate negatives, which were printed on large silk banners. Her book of the same name was published by Rim Books in 2024.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Athol McCredie is Curator of Photography at Te Papa. His familiarity with Te Papa’s photography collection began in the mid-1970s, when he worked as a photographic assistant at the National Museum. There, he printed many collection negatives in the darkroom, from the huge glass plates of James Bragge to 35 mm negatives taken by scientists on field trips. Inspired by these images, he co-curated a 1978 exhibition on Leslie Adkin. The success of the Adkin exhibition led to a role at the National Art Gallery as photography exhibitions researcher until 1981. From 1986–87, he was part-time visiting photography curator at the Gallery, where he worked on contemporary acquisitions and curated Politics and Photographs (1987) from the collection.
In 1993, after a period as a freelance researcher, curator, collection manager and photographer, he became art curator (and subsequently acting director) at the Manawatu Art Gallery (now part of Te Manawa). In 2001, he moved to Te Papa where he found the national museum and national art gallery photography collections combined, and with much historical material added. He has continued building this collection, concentrating particularly on twentieth-century and contemporary work.
His publications include The Tour: Photographs (1981), Witness to Change: Life in New Zealand; John Pascoe, Les Cleveland and Ans Westra (with Janet Bayly, 1985), Fields of Golden Daffodils (1991), Brian Brake: Lens on the world (editor, 2010), New Zealand Photography Collected first edition (2015), The New Photography: New Zealand’s first-generation contemporary photographers (2019) and Leslie Adkin: Farmer photographer (2024). He has contributed chapters to several books, and written many short texts for Te Papa Press publications, from Icons Ngā Taonga (2004) and Art at Te Papa (2009) to Flora: Celebrating our botanical world (2023).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is built on the framework of the first edition and I would like to acknowledge everyone who made that version possible. Particular thanks are due to Claire Murdoch, Te Papa Press publisher, who gave the first edition the go-ahead; Te Papa Press editor Hannah Newport-Watson who steered it through all phases of production; Helen Curran, who edited the text; Jeremy Glyde, who prepared the digital files for printing; and designer Alan Deare, who took my rough layouts and turned them into a book.
For this current edition, I’d like to thank Te Papa Press for proposing a refresh of the 2015 first edition. I was more than happy to take up the opportunity to include new work including collection photographs that had not been scanned in 2015 or which have been added to the collection since that date.
Many hands are involved in making a book. It begins with research, and I would like to thank Kirstie Ross, Jean-Claude Stahl and Jennifer Twist for their assistance, and acknowledge the resources of the Alexander Turnbull Library as well as those of Te Papa, and most especially Papers Past. I am also indebted to Stephanie Gibson, Sean Mallon, Colin Miskelly, Lissa Mitchell, Phil Sirvid and Andrew Stewart for reading sections of the text and making suggestions for improvements.
In the selection and juxtaposition of images I was hugely aided by Lizzie Bisley’s sure eye. She was always a willing sounding board whenever I was weighing up options.
At the production stage, Jo Elliott of Te Papa Press ably managed the workflows, keeping on top of endless details. Olivia Nikkel and Olive Owens also provided assistance. Virginia Were edited the text and reworked my less well written passages with a sure hand. Yoan Jolly reviewed and adjusted all the scans, translating my vague requests for ‘more oomph’ or ‘less murk’ into appropriate technical adjustments. Alan Deare and Dave McDonald of Area Design took their original design and gave it a more contemporary look as well as devising some adventurous improvements on my layout suggestions. Indexer Brian O’Flaherty made the book more useful and proof reader Kate Stone helped make it error-free.
Special thanks are due to Victoria Munn and Emily Goldthorpe who researched and drafted the biographical statements on photographers; Courtney Johnston, for spending some of her precious time to write a useful foreword; and Haley Hakaraia, who ensured we had the support of iwi and hapū to include photographs of their tūpuna.
More broadly, I would like to note the efforts of pioneering New Zealand photo-historians Hardwicke Knight, William Main and John B Turner, whose work provides a foundation for all books such as this. A debt is also owed to those who have built, documented, cared for and promoted the Te Papa collection from which this book is drawn. Beginning in the 1900s, these include Augustus Hamilton, James McDonald, John T Salmon, Charles Hale, Frank O’Leary, John B Turner, Trevor Ulyatt, Michael Fitzgerald, Luit Bieringa, Warwick Wilson, Peter Ireland, Mark Strange, Eymard Bradley, Paul Thompson, Ross O’Rourke, Adrian Kingston, Lissa Mitchell and Anita Schrafft. Recognition is also due to those curators outside the photography field who have instigated or supported acquisition of some of the photographs used in this book. They include Sean Mallon, Stephanie Gibson, Hanahiva Rose, Megan Tamati-Quennell and Isaac Te Awa.
Lastly, of course, I would like to acknowledge all the photographers, without whom this book would not have been possible. Thank you to all who gave their permission for work to be included. And special thanks to Mark Adams, Peter Black, Rhondda Bosworth, Bruce Connew, Murray Cammick, David Cook, Michael Hall, Mary Macpherson, Max Oettli, Chris CorsonScott, Tia Ranginui, Clive Stone and Jane Zusters, who assisted in a variety of ways.
As with any project like this there is as much good work left out as included. Selection was often a painful process, and I would like to acknowledge the many photographers whose work I admire and respect, but for one reason or another, could not fit in. Museum collections are assembled for the very long haul, so there will always be opportunities to present this work in future exhibitions or publications.
New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa
RRP: $90
ISBN: 978-1-99-107207-8
PUBLISHED: November 2025
PAGE EXTENT: 392 pages
FORMAT: Hardback
SIZE: 305 x 250 mm
FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO ORDER https://www.tepapa.govt.nz/about/te-papa-press/contact-te-papa-press