Photography’s Evolution and Overlooked Pioneers

Article extracted from Sight Lines by Kirsty Baker, Auckland University Press, RRP $69.99

Text extract from pp. 43–50

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Photography has occupied the fraught boundary between science and art since the announcement of its invention by Louis Daguerre in 1839. Early advances in the chemical and technological processes that came to shape the development of photography differed from existing means of artistic expression due, in significant part, to the distancing of the hand of the maker. In place of creating a subjective image by hand using an intermediary medium such as paint, charcoal, clay, wood or marble, the invention of photography seemed suddenly to allow the mechanised transcription of the world into visual form. Privileged for its veracity and remarkable level of detail, photography was embraced by a range of scientific fields from its earliest years. In 1843, for example, the botanist and photographer Anna Atkins produced the world’s first book to be illustrated with photographic images. Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions was fully illustrated with images made using the newly invented cyanotype process. Atkins placed seaweed samples upon light-sensitive paper and exposed them in direct sunlight, resulting in prints which are at once startlingly accurate and ethereally beautiful. Botany was not the only emerging branch of scientific discourse to benefit from the invention of photography: ethnography, physiognomy and criminology, among others, all drew on photography’s power of representation. In the development of these disciplines, the photograph was employed as a form of visual ‘evidence’, a new means of collecting data in order to classify the objects of study.

While many early photographs taken in New Zealand served such ethnographic purposes, they were by no means the only types of photographic image to be made here. As equipment became increasingly affordable, the number of photographs being made expanded exponentially. Curator and photographic historian Lissa Mitchell argues that it was, in part, this wealth of photographic image-making that has seen the contributions of early women photographers largely overlooked. ‘The kind of photography early women photographers were involved in making – namely commercial portraiture – doesn’t rate highly in retrospective historical accounts where the focus is on work that can be argued to have stood out in some way from the mass of photographs made in the nineteenth century.’ Mitchell’s 2023 book Through Shaded Glass: Women and Photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960 goes a long way towards redressing the balance. In it, Mitchell brings together research into almost 200 women working with photography, drawing out stories ‘of collaborative working practices and the women who, as part of families and businesses, were driven and determined makers of photography’.

One such woman was Margaret Matilda White, who set up a professional photographic studio in New Zealand in the late 1890s, following her arrival from Belfast in 1886. White is one of a small handful of early women photographers whose name has made its way into art history, her reputation built almost entirely upon a collection of glass-plate negatives that were donated to Auckland Museum by her son. These negatives include studio portraits of both European and Māori sitters, family photographs, group portraits taken in a variety of locations, scenes of heavy industry, and idyllic landscapes. These images also show that White was one of a number of photographers to document the tangi of Rewi Maniapoto, chief of Ngāti Maniapoto and prominent supporter of the Māori King movement.

It is, however, a suite of photographs taken in the grounds of the hospital where she worked as a nurse that has been singled out for critical attention. These images have entered into photographic history in this country, precisely because they can be interpreted as having ‘stood out’ in visual terms from the mass of photographic images made at the close of the nineteenth century.

Some time in the late 1890s, White was commissioned to photograph the buildings, grounds and staff of the Avondale Lunatic Asylum, as it was known at the time. Many of these images exhibit a distinctive compositional approach, rather than adhering to standard conventions of group portraiture, opening them out to speculative interpretation. In one image, eight women stand in a regimented line in a courtyard. Three curved arches are cut into the façade of the building behind them, framing the figures and granting the image a sense of symmetry and order. This order is echoed in the uniforms of the nurses, who stand in such close proximity that their starched white aprons overlap, physical linking the figures together. All eight are slightly turned to look out of the left edge of the picture frame, the uniformity of their gaze echoing that of their appearance. On closer inspection, though, slight incongruities work to disrupt this uniformity. The women do not hold their hands in a consistent manner: some are tucked out of sight behind their back, some hanging by their sides, and one holding what appears to be a set of keys. Though the curved arches suggest symmetry, the slant of the wall at the side indicates that the building has been photographed from a slight angle, rather than frontally, as it initially appears. While subtle, these visual disruptions are consistent with those seen in the more experimental images.

One of the most remarkable images taken in the hospital’s grounds also shows eight female nurses (see pp. 46–47). Where the first photograph presents the women as a unified group, here every aspect of the composition works to isolate one individual from the next. The women are once again posed in front of the façade, one of the arches visible in the upper right of the photograph suggesting White has positioned her camera close to the location she used for the first photograph. The slight diagonality hinted at in the first photograph is starkly apparent here. From her vantage point, White’s camera captures the courtyard in which she stands, a segment of lawn, and the lower portion of the façade. The angle at which the photograph has been taken causes the shrubbery edging the lawn to jut diagonally into the picture frame, rising upward from the lower left corner to create a sharp triangle that intrudes into the image. The building is cropped at the top, and this, paired with the camera’s low vantage point, creates a tilting perspective which is strangely claustrophobic. The camera angle also causes the decorative bands of dark brickwork, which run horizontally across the façade, to slope slightly, refusing to align with the rectilinear uniformity of the photograph’s left and right edges.  Each element of the built environment is slightly askew, highlighting the idiosyncratic positioning of the figures within the scene. In pictorial terms, the eight women occupy the midground of the photograph, but their arrangement is strangely unconventional. Three stand on the outer fringe of the lawn, awkwardly pressed against the hedge, which separates them from the five women standing in the courtyard. Each woman is positioned so that her body and face are turned at slightly different angles, neither looking at the same point of focus nor at each other. The static rigidity of the figures heightens the strangeness of the photograph, which poses unanswerable questions for a contemporary viewer. White’s compositional experimentation may strike us as being innovative for its time, a demonstration of her desire to forge a distinctive visual language, but we have no archival record of her motivations.

Though White’s photographs have predominantly been considered in stylistic terms, they also function as an insight into a rarely pictured aspect of life for women settlers during the colonial period: that of paid employment outside of a domestic environment. These photographs demonstrate the ways in which societal expectations were beginning to shift for women towards the turn of the twentieth century. Barbara Brookes notes that during this time, ‘young women took up new employment opportunities as factory, clerical and shop work increased from the 1880s, and new forms of professional training such as nursing and medicine developed’. Despite these new opportunities, the world of work was starkly divided along gendered lines, with a limited range of options for women who wanted – or needed – to find paid employment. During the 1890s, White worked as both a commercial photographer and a nurse at the asylum. The process of making these photographs worked to doubly position her as a professional woman. Not only do her images show women in their – and her – place of paid employment, but they also do so through the lens of a camera operated by a woman in a professional capacity.

White also turned the camera upon herself, taking a number of posed self-portraits. The self-portrait form provides women photographers with a remarkable level of representational autonomy. In choosing to picture herself, White is able to exert full control of her dress, adornment and personal presentation. It also grants her technical and artistic authorship over her own image. In one such self-portrait, White pictures herself in the grounds of the asylum, wearing the uniform that marks her as a nurse. She leans against a tree, her gaze turned away, with a set of keys hanging from her hand. A hedge bisects the centre of the closely cropped photograph, the lower portion filled with grass, the upper portion with the asylum’s distinctive façade. The self-portrait form allows White – the professional photographer – to picture herself in her professional role as a nurse.

The genre of self-portraiture also allows artists to make more experimental images than those that might be allowed by a commission. At some point in the early 1900s, White made a self-portrait which signals the fraught nature of photographic representation during this period. She has employed a familiar compositional structure to picture herself: she looks directly into the lens, the close crop and shallow picture space bringing her close to the viewer. Behind her hangs a korowai adorned with black hukahuka. White wears a high-collared black dress with distinctive pleats encircling her neck. Over the top of this dress a kahu huruhuru has been draped backwards, concealing the European-style dress from the neckline down. The pairing of korowai and kahu huruhuru creates a striking visual effect, their rich textural detail filling the entire picture frame. It is, however, White’s face which makes the greatest impact, for upon it the marks of a moko kauae are drawn. As an Irish woman, White held no cultural right to wear moko kauae, which was reserved specifically for wāhine Māori. For the twenty-first-century viewer, White’s self-portrait is a clear example of cultural appropriation, a jarring act of self-representation which would rightly court controversy if it were made today.

Little is known about this photograph, so the motivation behind its creation, like that of her distinctively composed group portraits, remains unclear. However, for a European viewer at the turn of the twentieth century, White’s self-portrait may very well have been interpreted as a sympathetic act of solidarity with Māori. When this image was made, Māori were under pressure to cease tā moko, a practice viewed by European settlers and missionaries as evidence that tangata whenua ‘were inferior and barbaric’. This photograph carries with it the complex range of attitudes that shaped Māori–Pākehā relations at the turn of the twentieth century. While to a European viewer in the 1900s it may be interpreted as a defence of Māori culture, a contemporary reading would differ significantly. This self-portrait is a powerful reminder that an art work’s impact and meaning are mutable. Individual artists may exist within a specific historical and cultural context, but the physical objects they produce are subject to the shifting tides of societal change. White’s complex photographic practice has created an idiosyncratic record of a nascent settler-colonial society. Her photographs offer fragmented glimpses – through a European lens – of a period when attitudes towards cultural and gendered difference were being contested and renegotiated.

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