We are all participants in an increasingly visual culture, yet we rarely give thought to the ways in which 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 definitive readings but instead 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. The essays cover subjects as diverse as the nineteenth-century world itself, and include a statue of Queen Victoria, Presbyterian mission photographs from China, Maori portraits, photographs of men together, asylum case file images, records of public works projects and international trade fairs. 

World War I is the end point of the book, as it coincided with profound cultural shifts, and 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.

Editors:

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. She is the author of In/visible sight: the mixed descent families of southern New Zealand (Wellington, 2009).

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 is the author of Koretsky: The Soviet Photo Poster, 1930–1984 (New York, in press). She has recently extended her research to both historic and contemporary New Zealand photography. 

Release Date: December 2011  |   RRP $50.00 / £29.50 UK

Otago University Press