New Zealand Photography: Collected
by Athol McCredie

Based on the evidence contained in New Zealand Photography Collected, we are a fascinating bunch. Far from being the ‘Passionless People’ chronicled in journalist Gordon McLachlan’s sombre 1976 assessment of the national character, we – during nearly two centuries of looking at each other via the connecting medium of photography – have been consistently interesting and creative and approached the task of documenting life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness with a winning combination of earnest seriousness and a dash of sly humour.

The same could be said of author Athol McCredie, Curator Photography at Te Papa where he has been combing through the national photography collection since 2001. That’s quite a task. The 500 images illustrated in New Zealand Photography Collected were winnowed from almost 400 000 housed at the National Museum.

This is the second iteration of New Zealand Photography Collected. The first in 2015 was one of the most successful illustrated books of the 21^st century, selling out two substantial print runs. A decade on, the Te Papa collection has grown by some 25 000 newly catalogued items; this 2026 edition also benefits from access to a further 60 000 digitized or scanned images. This edition features 50 per cent new images and represents a fresh dive into an enormous reservoir of photographs, plates and negatives.

Haruhiko Sameshima: Moa, Arthurs Pass, 1995. Gelatin silver print, 459 × 455 mm. Purchased 2001 with New Zealand Lottery Grants Board funds, O.027381

You’d be forgiven for just looking at the photographs. The author, in fact, would be quite relaxed if that was all any reader did. ‘Look at the images first,’ he urges, ‘then choose whether to read the text. Alone, the images are free to speak for themselves, and the eye to find its own response.’ This approach is hugely rewarding. The pristine quality of image reproduction is amongst the finest I have ever seen in published form. The images are so clear and accurate in tone and register I was sent racing to a range of other large photography compendiums to confirm this as empirical fact. Kudos to the imaging team, name-checked by Te Papa director Courtney Johnston in her foreword.

This glorious eye-candy, much dating to the 19^th century, sits in stark contrast to the retina-clogging garbage pumped into the flogosphere nowadays by your friendly local (or Uzbek-based) AI slop merchants. McCredie writes that ‘the photographs… have all been chosen because they raise questions rather than illustrate things already known.’ This is an approach that asks the viewer to be thoughtful and look to the past for insights into the state of our nation in 2026 and into the future.

McCredie has arranged New Zealand Photography Collected around seven hefty thematic chapters, beginning with ‘How we Looked’ and taking in ‘Pursuing Knowledge’ and ‘Conceiving a Photographic Art’ to arrive at the current moment – including work by contemporary photographers such as Tia Ranginui, Joyce Campbell, Mark Adams and Fiona Pardington, who will represent Aotearoa New Zealand this year at the 61^st Venice Biennale.

Every chapter is so richly illustrated and argued that each could be the subject of a dedicated review. The third chapter, ‘Belonging and Aspiring’, may have readers reaching for their hankies as it chronicles our grandparents and tūpuna forming associations, teams, leagues, clubs, orchestras, kapa haka groups, committees, Māori Congress, theatre troupes, battalions – joining together in common purpose to build Aotearoa New Zealand. McCredie explains that these ‘are public photographs’ designed ‘to broadcast a self-assured sense of an organisation’s importance within the structure of society.’

I’d hazard a guess that every reader of New Zealand Photography Collected whose whanau has been here for a few decades or longer will see something of their own family history or whakapapa in this chapter. Recent immigrants have no doubt left similar scenes behind from their own family biography and here they will see that Aotearoa is a place where identity can be shared across a wide variety of entities, clubs and groups that continue to foster good old-fashioned fellowship.

For this review I’ve selected six images, from the mid 19^th to the late 20^th century, that respond to the author’s brief of ‘raising questions’. Or amuse. Or move me, or all of the above. Readers will have their own favourites. That is the complex and nuanced joy of New Zealand Photography Collected.

The first you see here is by Haruhiko Sameshima, who has been taking photographs of Aotearoa and publishing books by our leading photographers since the 1980s. Many of his images carry a sense of history dissolving or becoming invisible in plain sight. Moa, Arthurs Pass from 1995 posits the concept of extinction as celebrity, which given the iconic status of long-lost bird species in Aotearoa such as the Haast Eagle, the Huia and of course the giant Moa, implicates human intervention, history and our love of a big bird. There was a time when almost every museum in Aotearoa featured a life-size Moa, recreating hunting scenes or compared with an Ostrich for scale. Here a concrete replica nearly five metres high poses, with a tourist, for a snap in its erstwhile ‘natural habitat’.

The development of Aotearoa as a colony in the nineteenth century was synchronous with the arrival of photography as a nascent technology. By the 1860s, portable plate cameras and advances in printing technology facilitated the dispersal of photographs via cards and albums. Amongst the most popular were portraits of Iwi Māori sent by European settlers to distant relatives as emblematic ‘natives’. In some uncomfortable cases, sitters were dragooned into colonial cosplay, their facial moko outlined in ink for greater effect. McCredie includes Mrs Stewart – possibly Miriama Te Kiritihanga Maunganoa, daughter of a Ngāti Maru chief – taken around 1870, and image that transcends and interrogates the genre.

Every rural town in New Zealand displays a sculptural memorial to the fallen of WWI, often in the form of the unknown soldier. In 2014 photographer Laurence Aberhart published Anzac, an anthology of these monuments, as a cultural taxonomy. But in an image here – reproduced, like Mrs Stewart, directly from the glass negative, we join those that made it back. James McDonad’s photograph shows the young men from the Maori Pioneer Battalion being welcomed home with a great feast of thanks at Gisborne a year after the conclusion of World War One. About 2500 Māori men served King and Country in the ‘war to end all wars’ – 336 died in active service and over 700 were wounded. So this is a scene of some joy and no little poignancy.

James McDonald, New Zealand (Maori) Pioneer Battalion. ‘Hui Aroha’, Gisborne, 1919. Gelatin glass negative, half plate, MU000523/001/0001

New Zealand Photography Collected contains a plethora of commercial and promotional photography: grocery delivery trucks, swimwear, models in socks and a shiny 1965 Ford Falcon station wagon. Frank Hoffman’s complex mise-en-scène is an artfully arranged promo for New Zealand’s largest commercial photography studio of the 1960s and 70s, revealing the equipment, props and lighting required, and professionals gainfully employed, to produce images for magazines and advertisements. It speaks to a time when photography was big business on the image capture and retail side of the equation. It was not so long ago that every high street sported a camera shop processing ubiquitous film brands such as Kodak, Agfa or Fuji or iconic camera equipment by Nikon, Leica and Hasselblad.

Frank Hofmann, Christopher Bede Studios, 1967. Gelatin silver print, 418 × 578 mm. Purchased 2016, O.044647

The lens in Aotearoa fell in love with whakairo, Māori carving, from the moment the camera ventured out of the studio and into the field in the 1850s. The first recorded photograph of a carving by Bruno Hamel, photographer on Austrian geologist Ferdinand Hochstetter’s expedition to the volcanic plateau, dates to 1859. William Hall Raine’s image from the 1930s reveals carvers and weavers rebooting these artforms after the intervention of Sir Āpirana Ngata and the formation of the Maori Arts and Crafts school in Rotorua in the 1920s. This detailed scene depicts students under the guidance of master carver Thomas Heberly at work on the restoration of the carved house Te Hau-ki-Tūranga which today sits at the heart of Te Papa Tongarewa.

William Hall Raine, Carvers and tukutuku weavers, Dominion Museum, 1936. Sheet film negative, half plate, B.013045

The Springbok rugby tour of 1981 was perhaps most divisive event of modern New Zealand history. Aotearoa’s de-facto religion rugby and racial politics (global and local) collided on the streets of Auckland with a violence that shattered complacency, innocence and some at the time said, the New Zealand social contract. Scenes of pitched battles between the police and anti-apartheid protestors are defining images of the 80s in Aotearoa. In this image, perhaps hiding behind a hydrangea bush for safety, photographer Terry O’Connor captures the infamous ‘Red Squad’ riot police, batons at the ready, defending a suburban home.

Terry O’Connor, Marlborough Street, Auckland, 12th September 1981. Gelatin silver print, 157 × 236 mm. Purchased 1983 with New Zealand Lottery Board funds, O.003018

The museum as a locus for the shared experience of culture is an underlying theme of New Zealand Photography Collected. It is fair to say that the role of the museum and its centrality in public life is going the way of broadcast media. Time will tell if our ability to experience culture as a collective exercise has ‘jumped the shark’ and is now dying a death of a thousand cuts, or a million AI cat memes, as new media and alternative facts hound us into silos, echo chambers and the psychic bunker that is the online sphere. But I’ve already had a good moan about that at the outset of this review and to paraphrase author McCredie I don’t want to belabour you with ‘the already known.’

Marie Shannon, The shark museum, 1992. Gelatin silver print, 378 × 441 mm. Purchased 2004, O.027310

So let’s finish with a real ‘fake’ image of some ‘actual’ sharks in a bricks and mortar Museum that playfully presages the world we now occupy. Remember visiting a museum as a child and being admonished to stay behind the rope, not touch the exhibits and follow the signs? Marie Shannon’s wee pipe-cleaner kids, carefully pick their way past a pair of epic taxidermy sharks of the sort that induced an entertaining form of mute faux terror for generations of Kiwi school kids. It is a photo-collage or doctored image. The (harmless) fun is the pun. McCredie describes such images as ‘resemblances… photographs have an artifice that takes some deciphering before we can extract meaning’. The richness of that deciphering is what powers New Zealand Photography Collected.