Max Oettli
Leslie Adkin: Farmer photographer by Athol McCredie (Te Papa Press, 2024), 244pp, $70
Marvellous thing, photography. You have your smartphone in your pocket, so you are a photographer. Forget about focal length, exposure, lighting, shutter speed, depth of field, tonal scale. Forget about darkrooms, negative-positive transference, fixing baths, toning baths—that era’s gone down the plughole for good. You fumble for the white shutter button, and iPhone or Android does the rest, like Mr Kodak used to. Instant product, instant gratification: ‘I am a camera.’ But a near-technically perfect picture you can flash on your screen to impress friends is one unlikely to be permanent, or to be looked at for more than an instant. The photographic print as a precious object to treasure and frame? Hardly. Exponentially fewer images ever make it onto paper now, and meanwhile we trust the digital image less and less.
Just a reminder: a century ago—even twenty-five years ago—things were a tad more complex, and even the lowliest amateur practising the craft of photography had to have some knowledge of the principles behind the medium. In the darkroom, there was a sense of performing a miracle: awareness of three dimensions reduced to two, of time stopped, and, at least until the post-World War II years, all colours rendered in delicate shades of grey. Photography itself began with the fixing of images permanently in silver, and this endured in various forms until the arrival of digital photography. (As an active photographer, developing my photographs from negatives in darkrooms from the 1960s through to the 1990s, I didn’t exactly understand the chemistry behind the miracle. In fact, the scientific proof of the formation and development of latent images was only clearly understood in 1989, and then only by high level chemists, just as silver-based photography was on its way out.)
For the colonial ethnologist and museologist, photography was an official collection device—a way of gathering information to amplify the historical record. But there were also many amateur photographers whose ambition was simply to chronicle events in their family circle and in the neighbourhood. One of the foremost among these was Horowhenua farmer Leslie Adkin (1888–1964). In Leslie Adkin: Farmer photographer, Athol McCredie (Curator Photography at Te Papa) traces Adkin’s legacy. We learn that more than 9000 photographs and negatives were deposited by his family after his death with Wellington’s Dominion Museum, now Te Papa. McCredie notes that they have become ‘amongst the most downloaded images by a single maker across all of Te Papa’s collections, second only to those of the nineteenth century Burton Brothers studio’. With so many images available, he writes, ‘it is difficult to find a way to his best work. This book attempts to address this problem and put the photographs in some context.’
Born in Wellington into a wealthy family the same year as Katherine Mansfield, Adkin produced a body of images that reads as a visual narrative of late colonial life. His photographs—invariably carefully composed and artfully balanced (his standard apparatus was a half-plate camera on a tripod)—offer a diary record of what appear to be charmed lives. His wife, Maud, and extended family, in exaggerated poses, cling to the running boards and exterior of a smart jalopy at Ōtaki Beach in 1927, conveying all the infectious glee of the flapper era in their bathing costumes, sun umbrellas and smiles. Or there are his two children, Nancy and Clyde, dressed for school, complete with fixed grins, and somehow radiating a rapturous intensity.
From his farm Adkin could see the Tararua Ranges, and this formidable feature, a brooding backdrop, became an area he explored, tramped and photographed constantly. He produced sweeping views of the Kāpiti coastline, and an extensive series of photographs on the construction of the Mangahao hydroelectric scheme, which used the northern Tararua rivers to supply power to the Wellington region. He photographed above the bush line; he photographed the last vestiges of the local flax industry; he photographed newly recovered Māori artefacts.
For this handsome book, designed by Neil Pardington, McCredie has selected around 150 full-page photographs, as well as sample pages from about sixty photographic albums released by Adkin’s widow. The Te Papa collection also contains many notebooks, scientific and topographical material, and archaeological items bearing witness to Adkin’s autodidactic energies. Adkin is close to a polymath in the breadth, depth and thoroughness of his work. For someone who dropped out of school, he was a prodigious note-taker and record-keeper. As a keen amateur archaeologist, he explored and mapped the terrain around his farm, and as a young man tramped from Levin to Taupō and back, producing superb maps and records along the way. He published a treatise on Māori place names; and he got into strife with the New Zealand Institute—which became the Royal Society—for his study, presented as a learned article in 1913, of the glacier formation of the Tararua Ranges. McCredie tells us his contribution was finally accepted as a valid scientific theory a century later in 2013.
Paging through this book, the early photos appear hallucinatingly sharp. Not surprising, considering the generous format he used, though McCredie tells us that in 1929 Adkin switched from a quite sophisticated Kodak Premo half-plate camera to a technically more primitive one, a Butcher Ensign box camera. ‘Perhaps his need for high quality field photographs for his scholarly work declined or maybe his eyesight was failing and he didn’t notice the drop in quality,’ he comments, laconically.
My photographer’s training kicks in as I look at a picture, circa 1911, of his young sister Vivian perched on the seat of a horse-and-four-wheel-phaeton in foreshortened perspective. There’s a sense of strong winter light casting shadows, with the horse’s nose and muzzle prominent in the foreground, and a depth of sharpness to the macrocarpa tree behind, with low distant hills in the background. I would say he has used a quarter-plate (9 x 11cm), and a standard lens at around 120 to 150mm, possibly a wide angle lens at around 90 or 100. Looking at maybe f/16 for the wide angle, f/22 for the standard, to get a sharp rendering from the gee-gee’s nose to infinity. Exposure around a second, possibly half a second. A tripod to hold the camera in place.
Adkin was certainly a fine technician in what was then a difficult grey area of correct exposure and development. However, we do not have an overly clear idea of what the original prints looked like: McCredie tells us that all of his work was contact-printed on gaslight paper (that is, developing paper able to be processed safely in a room lit by a gas lamp). This technique, with a well-made negative, gives a beautiful tonal range, from deep shadows to clean highlights, and the reproductions (which one assumes had some corrections made to them for the book) are a pleasure to look at. The book’s inclusion of album pages gives a useful sense of scale—the original prints would have been postcard-sized, matching their negatives from 6 × 9cm to half-plate.
No one makes photo albums now, alas, though Leslie’s dedication to recording and archiving was meticulous: ‘His son Clyde,’ McCredie tells us, ‘remembers how in his childhood when the family went on an excursion no one was allowed to get out of the car until his father had recorded the odometer reading.’
In his photography, a similar meticulousness—often stressful posing and organising of the family—would occur, with each person, horse or dog carefully placed in the field of his camera. The exceptions are his delightful beach photos, which occasionally give the impression of shooting spontaneously. Compare two beach scenes presented on opposing pages: one from 1927 shows a group of people with their dog standing in shallow water grinning disarmingly and not overly camera-conscious. Here, the framing’s slightly asymmetric, evidencing the viewfinder parallax problem common with box cameras. Opposite, there’s a 1923 New Year group, with the Adkin family included: happy smiles all round; children, ladies, gentlemen, all standing on the sand neatly lined up and impeccably dressed. Maud, his beloved wife, wins the prize for the best outfit: a generous gingham dress with a matching hat. A cropped-off figure on the left, a boy in soggy swimmers, probably the inaccurate viewfinder again, lends the photo a dose of spontaneity:
Those girls, those girls, those lovely seaside girls
All dimples, smiles, and curls—your head it simply whirls!
Leslie’s engagement with the lovely Maud lasted six years before wedding vows—perhaps a question of gaining propriety and respectability in accordance with the strait-laced attitudes of the times. McCredie confesses that he is a little in love with Maud himself—not surprising: she was beautiful and the perfect wife and mother. In these photographs there is never mud, or rain or tension or things breaking down; all is domestic bliss and harmony. Harvests are bountiful, and people and beasts stand tall. There’s a colonial propaganda element here—‘for Home and Empire’—but also an impression that Adkin, and his family, were keen cinema-goers, aficionados of Hollywood’s silent movies, with all that posing and positioning for photographs.
His fascinating and difficult-to-execute portrait studies in domestic interiors must have required very long exposures. One I found particularly intriguing, though it contains no people, is ‘Winter store of apples at Cheslyn Rise, July 1908’. With this picture’s crystal definition, we can almost smell the apples, neatly laid out in boxes and on sagging improvised shelves. But the army of myriad apples is displayed in a bedroom, complete with a Victorian fireplace and floral wallpaper. By contemporary standards, this image is borderline surreal.
There’s another photograph in the Te Papa online collection, but not included here, that shows a squadron of Prime Minister William Massey’s mounted special constables in Hanson Street, Wellington, near the Basin Reserve, during the 1913 waterfront strike. One of the mounted constables is Leslie Adkin. Most of these men were farmers and their participation in this exercise was organised by the Farmers’ Union. The violence with which this right-wing militia broke the strike earned them the name ‘Massey’s Cossacks’. And there’s a photograph online too, in the Te Papa collection, that carries the description: ‘Baton (48cm by 41mm diameter), brandished by Horowhenua farmer Leslie Adkin during the Great Strike of 1913’. Systematic as always, Adkin made five notches in the handle for the five men he whacked down with it.
MAX OETTLI was raised and educated in New Zealand and is a photographer, teacher and writer. He formerly taught photography at the Dunedin School of Art and now lives in Geneva, Switzerland.
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