Max Oettli
A Different Light: First photographs of Aotearoa edited by Catherine Hammond and Shaun Higgins (Auckland University Press, 2024), 284pp, $65
Let’s start with a beautifully composed photograph from the late nineteenth century produced by the Pegler Studio Group. It depicts the industry of photography in a busy Onehunga studio in an obviously posed scenario. On the left, a young male apprentice is removing an albumen print from a glass exposure frame. Next to him, a girl in her late teens is busy with brushes and an easel, likely engaged in colouring a photo. Another youngish woman is intently examining a freshly developed photographic plate, while a seated woman at the table is working with a pen or pencil. On the edge, the photographer himself is positioned with a wooden view camera on a tripod, his hand seemingly about to take the cap off the lens. There’s a curious length of rubber hose leading past the photographer’s trousers. It is attached to a little gas ring on the table, where a pot of some chemical is being heated. While most of the team is virtuously concentrated on their work, there is a very immediate eye contact with the photographer, who is making the most of the photographer’s right to stare; this is Mr Pegler, of the clear eyes. The other employees are also named in the photograph’s caption: S. Marks, the apprentice, together with E. Kitchen, N. McLeod and M. Evans, busy miming their daily roles in this crowded scene.
A Different Light: First photographs of Aotearoa draws on just three collections, albeit fine ones, from Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington, and Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena in Dunedin. The exhibition that accompanies the book is touring from Auckland to Wellington to Dunedin between April 2024 and January 2026. The Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu published a related but independent book in 2019 exploring similar themes, Hidden Light: Early Canterbury and West Coast photography by Ken Hall and Harihiko Sameshima, which drew on photography collections held by public institutions in Christchurch. However, the accompanying exhibition for that book was only shown in Christchurch.
The big difference between this volume and other collections of early New Zealand photography is that the authors are emphatically not deliberately choosing the most spectacular images, although the Auckland Harbour yachting photograph, ‘Tawea from the Crosstrees’ (1896) by Henry Winkelmann, is as fine a picture as any taken in the Land of the Long White Cloud over the past century and a half.
The pictorial curator at Tāmaki Paenga Hira, Shaun Higgins, writing in the second essay of this book, gives us a clear summary of the rapid evolution of the technology of photography in its first fifty years. He also reminds us that several of the early processes produced a unique image and that many of the pictures would have ended up back in the ‘Mother Country’, sent as tokens of affection and memory to families back ‘home’ by the emigrants to these shores. Higgins quotes Lawson Insley, a daguerreotypist and early photographer from the 1850s, who offered one-off daguerreotype portraits and Talbotypes (paper-print) portraits in newspaper advertisements, stating that these ‘can be safe in a letter to any part without any extra postage’. The tone of this claim about the new-fangled possibilities of image reproduction chimes with the idea of colonial progress and the spectacular growth of New Zealand towns and farms.
Scientific progress is the bastard child of the Enlightenment—the French photographic historian Giselle Freund directly links the invention of photography to this philosophy in her book Photography and Society, first published in 1936—and what do many of the photographs in A Different Light show but progress, as colonial settlements are cut out of the bush and swamps of New Zealand?
To look at the photographs in this book is to wish to see them in their original prints, the syntactic expression of different processes: the iridescent and mirror-like daguerreotypes; the mysterious flashes of ambrotypes, set off by their black velvet backgrounds, with tonal values jumping into reality; modest tin-types, the size of buttons; gritty, faded salt prints; and finally the magical albumen prints in their delicate shades of sepia. Some are tiny; for example, you must lean in to pick up the details on Edward Eyre’s portrait of Henare Taratoa in its lovely case. A few are huge: a studio portrait by photographer Herman Schmidt of Winifred Semple (a name full of resonance in the history of the Labour movement) towards the end of the period in 1913, is described as 1.8 metres high. And there’s an impressive number of double photos in stereo pairs, which I try to situate by goggling at them cross-eyed. I wonder whether the exhibition provides stereo viewers?
This seems unlikely. I am writing this in Geneva, Europe, so I’m looking at pictures in a book based on the original exhibition and reading the Introduction and the four carefully formulated essays by various curators and historians. All the pictures, understandably, have to respect the production limitations of a printed book and are squeezed down in size, with a few already small exceptions.
One of the important points Angela Wanhalla makes in her Introduction, sub-titled ‘Photography and Settler Colonialism’, is that the medium’s absolute beginnings occurred just before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. The writers refer variously and sometimes obliquely to the introduction and development of new photographic processes in Aotearoa and also launch some names and dates as ‘firsts’, while the colony’s story always walks beside them like a shadow. The writers also address the complex and shifting position that Māori subjects had in photography as the colony itself rapidly expanded.
The two photographic histories I can lay my hands on are the John B. Turner and William Main book, New Zealand Photography (PhotoForum,1993), and David Eggleton’s Into the Light (Craig Potton Publishing, 2006). Both draw from a much wider field and feature important images. Main and Turner have possibly more historical focus, whereas Eggleton’s sumptuous production had me sitting in a corner staring at the pictures and reading his elegant prose on a hot afternoon. A few of those peaks of photographic achievement anthologised by New Zealand Photography and Into the Light do figure in A Different Light but within a context of similar or analogous work.
So, for example, colonial photographs of the famous pink and white terraces showing the classic ‘before’ and ‘after’ of the 1886 eruption, in the context of Shaun Higgins’ chapter—‘Chasing Wonder: Photography in the Auckland Province’—are based on the Auckland Museum collection, with seven reproductions. The exceptionally fine 1886 ‘after’ photo by George Valentine (held in the Turnbull collection), shown in the Main and Turner book, and which David Eggleton also presents along with a pre-eruption photo, does not find a place here.
The texts by the curators in A Different Light are primarily historical and sociological, although also well informed by a good overview of the history of the medium in Aotearoa and by a carefully calibrated critical response. Who, having had the privilege of being invited to a marae, has not seen the photos on the walls of the wharenui showing tupuna whose presence in the house is thus established forever? Wanhalla writes of portraits:
Small gestures, such as entwined fingers, are represented in the visual record. Photographs do not just depict relationships but are imbued with them. As such, photographs are taonga and function to connect people across time and space.
Paul Diamond, Māori curator at the Alexander Turnbull, provides a narrative of the origins of the Waikato wars by essentially leafing through and commenting on a photo album formerly in the possession of a young military man, Charles Urquhart. Urquhart seems to have been stationed mainly in the Pokeno Bombay region of the lower Waikato. Diamond titles his chapter ‘Once we Were Traders’, in an ironic reference to Alan Duff, but the trading route he describes, and the interactions along it, are shown to be much more complex than we might have imagined:
Here the past might be thought of as not so much erased but as rendered translucent. Each layer of time builds on the previous and collectively it allows a peering through process to take place. The changes and alterations made to the past might be thought of as a series of accumulations. Every attempt to erase the past renders it potentially opaque, impenetrable and of no present benefit.
Diamond’s approach is almost archaeological, addressing not only descriptions of what is in the photographs but also digging and delving into various historical readings of what is being depicted:
The interpretations—by King, Binney, Hamilton, Main, this writer and others—will not be the last words. While the context may change as new information becomes available, the photographs endure as historical sources and as evidence. They prompt us to keep asking questions, such as who were these people, what were they doing and what happened to them?
Photography is miraculous, then, in the way it can revive the past.
Anna Petersen, the photography curator of the Hocken Collections, makes good use of that fine archive to consider how photography contributed to the colonial development of the region. She works mainly from the William Meluish and Joseph Perry photographic archives, documenting both Dunedin and the vast and mysterious hinterland beyond—which was invaded by gold prospectors from 1864 on. The gold rush led to a population movement to central Otago, as well as to a spectacular development of what was formerly mostly a Scottish religious settlement on the banks of Otago harbour. New migrants saw off the constricting menace of a Calvinist theocracy, although Petersen’s view on this is less simplistic and more granular:
… the reality was far more complicated. A consideration of Joseph Perry’s views of Otago taken in 1864 and 1865 provides a way to reveal more of those layers of meaning and significance … Partly for this reason it is worth presenting new details regarding the circumstances of their creation, exhibition and critical reception at some length. The information gleaned helps to build up a wider historical context, as well as adding to the sum of knowledge about photographic production in New Zealand during this early period. There is much to be gained from looking carefully at this aspect of our shared cultural heritage.
And she discusses photography’s vital contribution to Dunedin’s Great Colonial Exhibition of 1865, also known as the New Zealand Exhibition, which was an exhibition intended to promote the evident benefits of colonialism and provide proof of industrial ‘progress’.
The fourth and final chapter of the book is contributed by Natalie Marshall, formerly curator of photography at the Turnbull Library. Her essay is titled: ‘Camera Fiends and Sharpshooters: Early Amateur Photography in Aotearoa’, a title that invites the consideration that the magical medium of photography has always had a somewhat permeable border between the professionals and the amateurs—and arguably any halfway decent ‘picture’ is primarily the product of passion, professional or not.
But Marshall’s contribution is essentially a sociological one, and her primary interest is in documenting the domestic sphere in the lives of early colonial settlers:
Photographs taken by amateur photographers are often private images. They can provide intimate glimpses of the photographers’ personal lives and of what mattered to them most: their backyards and neighbourhoods, their hobbies and occupations, their new-born babies and social networks. During the nineteenth century, photography became increasingly accessible and democratised due to technological advances and widening appreciation, opening up the wonder of photography to the wider society.
This is an important point. A medium that, because of technical requirements and expense, had been limited to the hands of so-called Gentleman Amateurs in the 1850s became, just a few decades later, available to a large part of the population. Discussing the Kodak camera revolution, Marshall quotes an article from 1900:
It is hardly possible for a lady to show herself on any public holiday without hearing the click of a Kodak and seeing the face of an amateur hoodlum concealed behind a hideous grin, no doubt thinking he had performed a great deed.
Marshall looks at three camera ‘operators’: James Coutts Cameron, Henry Wright, and finally towards the end of the century, Robina Nicol. One significant fact is that none of these names is even remotely known to mainstream photo historians, and Marshall carefully explains how the collections and albums of their photographs came to be in the Turnbull collection. She creates good biographical sketches of the three, often drawn from a close reading of the photos presented, touching on religion, dress and the living environment of the photographers and their families. And of course every photograph is part of an enormous documentation of historical facts.
In some, the facts are clear enough, such as the photograph of a team of bullocks hauling along Constable Street in Newtown, Wellington, a splendid image made by Henry Wright in 1872. But others are more ambiguous or complicated and take the skills of a social historian to tease out—for example, the richness of detail in clothing, gardens, and domestic accessories documented by Robina Nicol. As a woman’s perspective, it provides an interesting comparison with the work of Margaret Mathilda White, which Shaun Higgins gives us a glimpse of from the Auckland collection. I note that Lissa Mitchell’s book on New Zealand women photographers, Through Shaded Glass, published in 2023, does not figure in the bibliography, but perhaps it was published too recently.
It seems from these archives that photography at this time was almost exclusively a Pākehā activity, although Māori sitters were actively solicited by studios for their exotic value, while wealthier and prominent Māori were also generally well-documented, though Angela Wanhalla does point out Parihaka leader Te Whiti and his co-leader Tohu Kākahi refused to be photographed.
I admire the carefully crafted look of this publication, with its period-era treatment of contributors’ photos. My one quibble is that there is no nominative index with short bios of the photographers concerned. Nevertheless, this is an important and absorbing photographic history.
MAX OETTLI was raised and educated in New Zealand and is a photographer, teacher and writer. He formerly taught and lectured in photography at the Dunedin School of Art. He currently lives in Geneva in Switzerland.
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