Through Shaded Glass - reviewed
Through Shaded Glass. Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960
Lissa Mitchell
Published by Te Papa Press, June 2023
Reviewed by Mary Macpherson for Landfall Online, July 2023
Also reviewed by:
Jessica Agoston Cleary for Kete Books
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.
Continue reading the full review by Mary Macpherson at Landfall Online.
Read the full introduction by Lissa Mitchell here.
Winifred Couper, Amy Couper in the Cosmos, 1915.
We need your help to continue providing a year-round programme of online reviews, interviews, portfolios, videos and listings that is free for everyone to access. We’d also like to dream bigger with the services we offer to photographers and the visual arts.
We’ve partnered with Press Patron to give readers the opportunity to support PhotoForum Online.
Every donation helps.