Mary Macpherson
Though Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960 by Lissa Mitchell (Te Papa Press, 2023), 368pp, $75
I searched online for nineteenth-century New Zealand photography. The first link that came up was Te Ara Encyclopedia of New Zealand’s page on photography in the 1840s to 1880s. It covered the role of photography in recording the colonial narrative of progress, portraiture and carte de visite prints and listed the Burton and Tyree Brothers, William Meluish, James Bragge and several other male photographers. This otherwise well-informed entry only mentioned one woman, Elizabeth Pulman, for her role in photographing Māori, with the comment that she was probably New Zealand’s first woman photographer. In the section about photography from the 1880s to 1960s, seven women were referenced, compared with around seventeen male photographers.
We now have a major corrective to these, and other scanty narratives, in Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960 by Lissa Mitchell, a lavishly-illustrated blockbuster of a book that reveals a whole world of women active at every level of photography. There are the women who worked behind the scenes at the studios in a multitude of roles, making operations possible; the women who ran studios with their husbands and took them over when their husbands died; the women who started their own businesses; the women who documented their families and communities; Māori women photographers; the women who took part in camera clubs and the Pictorialist and Modernist movements; the women who recorded the beauty of Aotearoa’s mountains and wildlife.
Mitchell, who is the curator of historical photography at Te Papa, emphasises that she’s looked at women as individuals:
This book shines a light on those women [as makers and subjects], and in the process recovers the identities and stories of women who have been hidden from history. Its deliberate focus is on individuals, not to argue for them as exceptional but rather to combat anonymity and generalisations, particularly in the case of working-class women.
In the service of these histories, Mitchell comments that she’s revealed the less-explored areas of our photographic history, including portraiture, the photographic factory and studio workers, and amateur photography. It’s a broad approach that reveals how photography was used in people’s lives and businesses and throughout society in early New Zealand.
Although recognised Pictorialist image-makers such as Thelma Kent and Una Garlick are featured, and the photographs that illustrate every story are frequently arresting or beautiful, this a book with a four-page appendix of all the women covered. Such thoroughness is less about making heroes of particular photographers and more about highlighting as many stories as possible and providing context for their work. I didn’t finish the book with the sense of there being someone like the epic turn-of-the-century Wyoming photographer Lora Webb Nicols, who left a stunning 24,000-image archive showing an intimate view of life in her frontier state.
The book begins with the women who worked in the photographic studios. Mitchell comments that the work of finishing photographs ‘is given much less attention in histories than the job of taking them’. From the 1860s, multiple steps were needed between an image being captured on a glass plate negative and a portrait being handed to a customer. Retouching negatives, printing and colouring work were frequently performed by women, alongside their work as a reassuring presence in reception and dealing with customers. Mitchell is strong on providing social and economic context for photographic work, highlighting that although many women might have come out to the colony as domestic servants, an increasing number of jobs, including in photographic studios, became available, enabling women to move away from the constraints of domestic service.
Classified advertisements are a major source of information about women workers in photographic factory studios and, sometimes, spectacular accidents that made the news pages. There’s the story of sisters Julia Finch and Louisa Irwin, who, in May 1886, were talking to a client in the London Portrait Rooms in Princes St in Dunedin. An explosion was heard, and rocks flew through the ceiling, killing both sisters. Mitchell comments: ‘Had they not died in such gruesome and well publicised circumstances, the fact that Julia Finch and Louisa Irwin had worked in the London Portrait studio for so many years would be unknown.’
In this section, illustrations feature exquisite hand-coloured photographs, from early carte de visites—including one of a boy in a kilt of green-painted tartan—to work from the 1950s like baby Radha Sahar in a delicate pink frock with a light blush on her cheeks—an image hand-coloured by her mother, who helped make ends meet by working at home for the Nevill Studio in Dunedin. Retouching and hand-colouring were often done by women trained in drawing and painting or who had attended art schools. An elegant black and white Frank Hofmann photograph of the Christopher Bede Studio from 1949–50 shows a line of women seated at their easels working on images beside a bank of windows, giving the distinct feeling of a production line.
Mitchell takes to task the 1949 book The History of Photography by MoMA curator Beaumont Newhall, who celebrated photography for being ‘apparently unmanipulated’ and helped privilege content above all else, a Modernist position. This contributed to devaluing the skills of retouching, colouring, printing and mounting as feminine work, as opposed to ‘the photographer as a masculinised artistic figure taking images that conveyed vision and ideas.’ Yet, the painted photograph from Te Papa’s collection of two girls wearing enormous white bonnets with embroidered flowers on silk hovering above them, made around 1902, seems closer to today’s mixed media practices where photographs can be rendered as weaving or embroidered or printed on fabric, than Modernist images, for all their sharp-edged beauty.
The book’s chapters are divided by types of work, such as studio photography or amateur photography, and by approaches, such as being modern or photography on the move. This approach corrals Mitchell’s wealth of research into coherent groupings while allowing her to roam freely across time, place and people. Along the way, we learn quite a bit about conditions of life in early Aotearoa, such as the number of outlying settlements that supported multiple studios operated by women. Mitchell gives examples from Greymouth, Hokitika, Gisborne, Inglewood, Pukekohe and Whanganui, as well as many in the main centres. Where there’s more than a paragraph of information on a woman’s career, the examples come alive, such as sisters May and Mina Moore, who set up a studio in Wellington, often signing their prints together as a collaborative endeavour and employing only women in their business. Portraits of the sisters, in their fur, lace and terrific hats, show warm, engaging faces, like friendlier members of the Bloomsbury set. The Moores used dramatic light and shade to create ‘Rembrandt portraits’, and their images in rich brown, often printed on textured paper, attracted artists and performers to their studio. The book features handsome, moodily-lit portraits of the English actor Lily Brayton as Cleopatra and another image where she sports a fantastic hat creation. Brayton endorsed the value of being photographed by a woman. May Moore moved to Sydney, possibly Mitchell speculates, inspired by stories from the famous well-travelled Te Arawa performer Mākereti. With her husband’s help, May ran a studio in Sydney until the late 1920s, while her sister Mina opened a studio in Melbourne before retiring in 1918. May’s death in the early 1930s was widely reported on both sides of the Tasman.
Another history that stands out is of Ramai Rongomaitara Te Miha (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tahu), later known as Patricia Miller, who started at Wellington’s Cuba Studios before opening her own businesses, ending up in Devonport, Auckland, where she created elaborate sets for her studio portraits. As her Patrica Miller business grew, she opened a second studio in Queen St and by 1946 had eight employees, mostly female. She played the female lead role in Rudall Hayward’s film Rewi’s Last Stand and married the filmmaker in 1943. Mitchell comments that Hayward’s business success supported and financed her husband’s filmmaking and her own move into partnership with him as a filmmaker. The book features a knockout studio portrait of an elegant Ramai in a French bridal gown. It is one of several accounts of Māori women photographers across the photography genres, countering the idea that Māori were only passive subjects of the colonial lens.
Mitchell has recorded an abundance of women’s stories through the decades, which become more engaging when greater information is available to flesh them out, including details of the economic and social conditions affecting their work. One of the most uncomfortable reports is of Austrian and German immigrant women photographers who, in the 1930s, brought new ideas and ways of working from cities like Berlin and Vienna, challenging the strong British influence on New Zealand photography, which centred on the Pictorialist tradition. However, these exciting women photographers, such as Irene Koppel, Hanne Henckels, Lily Byttiner and Maja Blumenfeld, were subject to the wartime Alien Control Emergency Regulations, which ‘prohibited aliens from possessing, among other things, any camera or photographic apparatus without special police permission’. The women were subject to surveillance and questioning and often had their cameras confiscated, even when married to a New Zealand citizen, severely affecting their ability to make a living. Like other government regulations, it might have made sense at the time but today reads more like repression.
At least half the power of this book belongs to the photographs, which illustrate many of the stories. The handsome design by Fiona Lascelles allows the images plenty of room to breathe and places them satisfyingly close to the narratives about their makers. I felt that the best examples of each woman’s work had been chosen, with the result that whether it’s early carte de visite portraits, hand-coloured or embroidered work, stagily-lit studio portraits, informal amateur portraits, or workplace or community images, all the photographs sing. At the risk of sounding nerdy, the reproduction of the images also shines, something that’s not always a given in cost-conscious trade photography books but which makes a difference to the pleasure of looking. At a deeper level, these images, often, but not always, of Pāhekā women and children dressed in their best, community events, workplaces and early women mountaineers, give us part of the history of our country across the centuries. It’s difficult not to be moved by this, and the book deserves to fly high at the next Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
I finished the book with two thoughts. It would be exciting to have a historical fiction writer base a novel on the life of an early woman photographer so that elusive details of all these endeavours could be represented in one engrossing account. And, will this book make a difference to the writing about early New Zealand photography? Will there be more narratives about women photographers, or will the categories explored here and the fact that many women’s work has been lost mean that history will remain with the existing ‘masters’? Perhaps it will depend on who is writing the story.
MARY MACPHERSON is a photographer, poet and photobook maker from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. She is also an art writer and member of the 2024 Photobook/NZ Festival committee.
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