Lissa Mitchell

Through Shaded Glass. Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960

Published by Te Papa Press, June 2023

Written by Lissa Mitchell, Curator Historical Photography at Te Papa, Through Shaded Glass takes the reader on a journey through the backrooms of nineteenth and early twentieth-century photographic studios, into private homes, out onto the street and up into the mountains, and looks at the range of photographic practices in which women were involved. Through superb images and fascinating individual stories, it brings an important group of photographers into the light.

The Introduction of Through Shaded Glass is reproduced here, with permission from Lissa Mitchell and Te Papa Press, to give you an insight into the significance of this ground-breaking book. It is available now from all good bookstores or at the following link:

https://tepapastore.co.nz/collections/te-papa-press/products/through-shaded-glass-women-and-photography-in-aotearoa-new-zealand-1860-1960

Through Shaded Glass.

Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960

Lissa Mitchell

Introduction

ON 16 APRIL 1883 a most unusual case came before the magistrate sitting at the court in Naseby, in Central Otago. Fifty-seven-year-old Marion White, who had been a domestic servant in her native Scotland and was now married to a goldminer, had travelled to the settlement some weeks before to have her portrait taken by photographer Malcolm Ries, who ran the only photographic studio in town. She did not like the proofs she was shown, and when she told him so a flaming argument began that spilled out into the street. The constable was called and Ries was charged with using indecent language.

On the day of the hearing Ries conducted his own defence, during which he mocked White for expecting him to show her as a much younger woman: ‘I can’t make a young girl of you,’ he said. Ries was found guilty as charged and fined. 1

 Given this unpleasant experience, it is easy to see the appeal that a woman photographer might have had for Marion White, and had she been living elsewhere she may well have been able to find one. It is not certain why White found her way to Malcolm Ries’s studio in 1883. Perhaps, having worked hard to establish a new life here, she wanted to send her portrait back to her relatives in Scotland as proof of her success. She expected Ries to show her as she saw herself, but, in an era when, unless you were wealthy and had been taught the complexities of operating the glass plate negative process, and when only professionals owned cameras, he held the power. As the decades passed, however, women would come into their own in photography in Aotearoa New Zealand, both as makers and as subjects.

This book shines a light on those women, 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. 2

Along the way, the book reveals less explored areas of New Zealand photographic history, including portraiture, photographic factory and studio workers, and amateur photography. It delves into photographic genres such as home portraiture, family photography, album making and photojournalism, as well as the ways that images circulated and were seen in illustrated newspapers, books and other publications from around 1900. It takes the reader on a journey through the backrooms of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century photographic studios, into people’s homes, out onto the street and up into the mountains. It looks at the multitude of photographic practices in which women were involved – including hand colouring and retouching photographs, as receptionists, stylists and chaperones in studios, and as photographic apprentices and assistants developing negatives and printing and finishing photographic prints as well as operating the camera.

SHORTLY AFTER its development from the 1830s into the process we know today, photography became a commodified product in Britain, Europe and the United States. In the early years, it was a form of home science, undertaken predominantly by men with the assistance of their wives, children and servants. Photography was more collaborative and family based than originally assumed. 3

By the 1850s – at least in Europe and the United States – most photographs were being made in studios that resembled small factories. The power in the studio lay with the owner, whose name appeared on all the work made.

Studio employees were poorly paid and their contribution was largely overlooked, yet the system was a means of gaining skills and, for some, a lift in status. Some firms were run on an employer and employee model, but others were family businesses that also employed some outsiders. As the British Empire expanded and immigrants came to such countries as Aotearoa New Zealand, they brought their photography skills with them or soon gained them once they arrived. Colonial photographic businesses tended to be sole operators with a small number of staff, studios run by couples and/or siblings, or itinerant operators who moved around the country.

The contribution of women to these enterprises has been overlooked in New Zealand photographic histories to date. Such accounts have focused on creating a narrative of great photographers – master makers – who were documenting the colonisation of Māori and, pre-eminently, the landscape – recording change, ownership and progress and, later, lamenting lost heritage. Lurking in the wings, though, are the stories of collaborative working practices and the women who, as part of families and businesses, were driven and determined makers of photography.

In the later years of the nineteenth century, photography was promoted more widely as an art and as an educational hobby, and people could learn the processes and gain further skills by joining photography clubs and societies. In Aotearoa New Zealand, learning on the job in a commercial studio and joining a camera club were the main ways someone could learn photography outside of family and social connections; formalised education in photography came later in the twentieth century. In the 1890s, many women opened photographic businesses and ‘lady photographers’ frequently advertised in newspapers.

Those whose stories appear in this book are mostly white settler women or their descendants. Māori women worked in studios from at least the 1890s, but any involved in the preceding decades have not yet been identified. Perhaps future researchers will uncover more stories of early photographic making by Māori, and perhaps some are hidden in the stories here; the scarce details in the public record may conceal their ethnicity.

This book also embraces women who worked as curators of and writers about photography before 1960. Amy Castle, for example, was employed in 1907 as a temporary assistant in the photography section of the then Dominion Museum under its director Augustus Hamilton, but before long became the museum’s entomologist. She worked at the museum until she was made redundant in 1931 as part of government spending cuts. 4

One of the earliest writers on the history of photography in Aotearoa was Dunedin woman Felicia Walmsley, 5, who is an example of a generation of young women for whom photography was considered a valuable educational hobby. By 1920, when her history of the Dunedin Photographic Society was published, Walmsley, who later qualified as a doctor, had been a successful photographer and society member for about eight years. Her account, which includes the contribution of women members to the society’s survival during the First World War, was published in the Australasian Photo-Review, which was produced in Sydney and widely read in New Zealand. However, because the journal was an overseas publication, it was not held in libraries here. Even the Dunedin Photographic Society could not find a copy of Walmsley’s article for its centenary publication in 1990. 6

This book’s end date of 1960 is also deliberate. Rather than being a history that continues up to the present, thereby forcing most of the women from this period into an early chapter or two about ‘the pioneers’, it takes a broader view of the types of photographs made, the people who made them and the conditions in which they worked. With regard to lesser-known women in particular, I have tried – as photographic historian Val Williams put it – to trace their careers in as much detail as possible, and by doing so give them back some of their history. 7

 Lissa Mitchell

February 2023

 Notes:

1. Mount Ida Chronicle, 21 April 1883, p. 3.

2. Charlotte Macdonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single women as immigrant settlers in nineteenth-century New Zealand, Allen & Unwin and Historical Branch, Department of Internal Affairs, Wellington, 1990, p. 10.

3. Photography historian Rose Teanby has found that many of these people have been omitted from the accounts of the discoveries and achievements of early photography, and her recent research has been uncovering their contribution. See ‘The First Women of Photography 1839–1860’, online lecture, Photo Oxford 2020 and the Royal Photographic Society, youtube.com/watch?v=HxzXjBL6TJQ

4. Jean-Marie O’Donnell, ‘Castle, Amy’, Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 1998, updated September 2011. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/4c14/castle-amy, accessed 11 June 2022.

5. Felicia Walmsley, ‘A History of the Dunedin Photographic Society’, Australasian Photo-Review, 15 April 1920, pp. 205–6.

6. T Maguire, The Lantern was Lighted: A history of the Dunedin Photographic Society Inc., 1890–1990, Dunedin Photographic Society, Dunedin, 1990, pp. 19–20.

7. Val Williams, The Other Observers: Women photographers in Britain 1900 to the present, Virago Press, London, 1986, p. 7.

Through Shaded Glass has been reviewed by:

Mary Macpherson for Landfall Online

Jessica Agoston Cleary for Kete Books

Hamish Coney for Aotearoa New Zealand Review of Books

Lyn Potter for NZ Booklovers

Mark Amery for The Post

Catherine Woulfe for New Zealand Geographic