We are all participants in an increasingly visual culture, yet we rarely give thought to the ways that photographs shape our experience and understanding of the world and historical past. This book looks at a range of New Zealand photographs up to 1918 and analyses them as photo-objects, considering how they were made, who made them, what they show and how our understanding of them can vary or change over time.
This emphasis on the materiality of the photograph is a new direction in scholarship on colonial photographs. The writers include photographers, museum curators, academics and other researchers. Their essays are not intended as definitive readings but rather offer a variety of ways in which to read the images they have chosen. In the course of the book, they explore a host of issues related to the development of photography in New Zealand. World War I is the end point, as it coincided with profound cultural shifts with the expansion of the mass illustrated press and the rise of consumer photography, as well as a change in New Zealand's place in the world.
Contributors: Wayne Barrar, Roger Blackley, Gary Blackman, Chris Brickell, Barbara Brookes, Sandy Callister, Simon Dench, Jocelyne Dudding, Keith Giles, Jill Haley, Ken Hall, Ruth Harvey, Kerry Hines, Antje Lübcke, Brian Moloughney, Max Quanchi, Rebecca Rice, Cathy Tuato'o Ross, Simon Ryan, Angela Wanhalla, Christine Whybrew and Erika Wolf.
| Author Information: | ||||
| Angela Wanhalla is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Otago. She specialises in the histories of cultural encounter in New Zealand's colonial past, focusing on gender, race and colonialism in the nineteenth century, the indigenous history of the North American West, and the history of intimacy, particularly interracial relationships and hybridity. | ||||
| Erika Wolf lectures in art history and theory at the University of Otago. A graduate of Princeton and Michigan universities, her primary field of research is Soviet art and visual culture. She has recently extended her research to both historic and contemporary New Zealand photography. | ||||
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| Published: University of Otago Press (NZ) - February 2012 | ||||
| Format: Paperback | ||||
| Subjects: Photographic equipment & techniques : New Zealand | ||||
List Price: 29.50 Pounds Sterling |
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Comments
I recommend these reviews of this publication by Peter Ireland and David Eggleton
Might I also recommend the following books on New Zealand photographic history:
Knight, Hardwicke, NEW ZEALAND PHOTOGRAPHERS: A SELECTION, Allied Press, Dunedin, 1981
Knight, Hardwicke, PHOTOGRAPHY IN NEW ZEALAND, A SOCIAL AND TECHNICAL HISTORY, John McIndoe, Dunedin, 1971
Main, William, WELLINGTON THROUGH A VICTORIAN LENS, Millwood, Wellington, 1972 (Reprinted 1980)
Main, William, AUCKLAND THROUGH A VICTORIAN LENS, Millwood, Wellington, 1977
Main, William & Turner, John B., NEW ZEALAND PHOTOGRAPHY FROM THE 1840s TO THE PRESENT, PhotoForum, Auckland, 1993
There are also a number of valuable monographs on various photographers as well as several good tomes on Maori photography including those by Bill Main and Michael Graham-Stewart.
Ken Hall has produced a nice book on George Valentine's work in New Zealand and is currently researching a book on his father James Valentine of Dundee.
Cheers!
Marcel