Photography |
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Since its invention over 160 years ago, photography's ability to fix a moment in time has been a source of fascination. A large part of our attraction to photographic images can be explained by the fact that those fixed moments are the stuff of experience and memory. And we are all formed by our memories. Picturing our experiences in photographs; selecting and arranging them as memories has become part of our lives. In this topic you can see a number of albums and photo-diaries which demonstrate the continuing importance of this kind of personal image making.
But photography is used for many purposes. From the snapshot to the police 'mug shot'; from satellite images to the glossy fashion spread, photographs are everywhere: a dominant feature in the environment of competing images that we inhabit. If you are in a big city, wherever you look there will be photographic images clamouring for your attention. Chances are they will also be trying to sell something. But you can also go to a museum or gallery and have different experiences of photographs. In this topic you will encounter a wide range of photographic uses. A number of key images will be examined in detail to see how they work.
The ways in which photographs are made have changed during the 20th century as cameras and film have become cheaper, more portable and easy to use. The recent introduction of digital technology will yield as yet unimagined images. The relation between many different photographic practices - from the snapshot to art photography - has become subtle and complex and this has had an effect on the way photographs look, as well as the way we look at them. But we should remember that the raw excitement of photography lies in pointing a camera at something to see what it will look like as an image. And that mysterious excitement is available to anyone.
In this topic you will find hundreds of images by 19th and 20th century New Zealand photographers (note that some photographers spanned 19th and 20th centuries) - professionals, amateurs, artists, children - who have gone out into the world wide-eyed with curiosity. Their work will give you a good idea of what photography has been about in New Zealand over the last 150 years. Enjoy!
The invention of photography was announced in Paris in 1839. The rapidly developing industrial and scientific cultures of Europe recognised photography's potential as a remarkable new tool for recording and classifying the physical world as it was being revealed through exploration and colonisation. Some of New Zealand's earliest professional photographers were called on to record gold fields and battlefields.
Excitement at the new invention soon spread as more and more people were amazed by their own portraits on film, not to mention by exotic sights like the Egyptian pyramids brought back by travelling photographers. New Zealand itself - on the opposite side of the globe to Europe - was an exotic land and photographs of its natural features and indigenous people were sought after. In our 'special-effects' time it's hard to imagine just how wondrous these images must have seemed. But, as you look at early photographs, some of them 150 years old, try thinking about how they would have appeared to someone your own age at the time they were taken.
Imagine too the sheer effort involved in taking some of these photographs; whether several thousand feet up in the mountains or deep in the bush, those big early cameras with their hefty tripods, and large glass plate negatives, jars of chemicals and a portable darkroom, had to be lugged by man and horse. Little wonder that some photographers preferred to stay in the studio and ply the lucrative portrait market.
However, in New Zealand most photographers had to be versatile. In any case, many were naturally curious and adventurous types who had other professions. They were drawn to photography as a means of recording their experience of a fascinating, but alien country and its inhabitants. That tradition of curiosity and do-it-yourself resourcefulness has been a characteristic of New Zealand photographers ever since.
The 20th century saw the practice of photography transformed by technology, as well as by its adoption as serious means of visual expression. It was a century in which photography became increasingly important to avant-garde artists and art museums at the same time as it became the century's most 'democratic' artform. The 'instamatic' made everyone a photographer.
Despite the many facets that go to make up photography at the end of the 20th century, what remains true is that certain photographs "make us more aware of the world we inhabit," extending our perceptions of what it looks like, what it feels like. In this respect 20th century photography was defined by its drift away from the 'beautiful' photographs of the past, toward an unflinching willingness to show things in their worst possible aspect. At times the medium even seemed to reveal a psychological dimension beneath the surface appearance of things.
Known as social documentary, that photographic style flowered mid-century in the United States and went on to dominate photography, worldwide, for much of the remaining century. Development of the hand-held 35mm camera with its portability and continuous roll film, gave impetus to the social documentary style. Moreover, its claim to objectivity, led to the proliferation of photojournalism in the print media, dramatically increasing the circulation of photographic images in western cultures.
In New Zealand, social documentary remained the dominant photographic style until the final couple of decades of the century. However, the assumption that serious photography must conform to its look - blunt camera angle, exclusively black & white, usually high contrast and grainy - was challenged by the emergence of a more eclectic approach to the medium that saw rediscovery of earlier traditions occur alongside experimentation. Colour film and large-format cameras, feminist-inspired interest in the personal and fragmentary, as well as experimentation with 'theatricality', installation and digital manipulation were all part of the end-of-century mix.
The history of photography's technologies and processes, as well as their myriad applications in a rapidly changing world is a specialised one and can only be touched on superficially within the scope of this section.
It is a history that parallels the rapid developments in western science and technology that occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. One hundred and sixty years or so have passed since photography's invention, which was really the invention of a means of fixing images. Images had been successfully projected through the lens of a camera obscura since the 16th century, when artists used such projections as an aid to drawing. But it was the first photographic fixing processes perfected in France in 1839 - most famously the Daguerrotype process - which initiated what would become a continuing search for ever more effective ways of capturing and reproducing images. Images that would proliferate and find applications in such diverse areas as social reform, commerce, mass media, science, surveillance, and espionage and art.
In this section you will find examples of some of the earliest photographic processes (e.g. daguerrotype), as well as cameras (e.g. box cameras, field cameras, large format and reflex cameras) and images of photographers at work. You will also encounter some intriguing photographic ephemera.
Barnett, Gerald. Photography. Discover: Te Kohanga Taonga, updated June 29 2002. URL: http://discover.natlib.govt.nz
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