Abstract:
The focus of this study is a collection of photographs acquired by the Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki in 2010. These photographs were taken by a range of amateur and professional twentieth century New Zealand photographers, and had formed part of a wider collection of photographs belonging to the New Zealand Centre for Photography. Analysis of photographs from this collection sheds light on the concerns and emphases of various New Zealand photographic groups, in particular camera clubs, in relation to what was, and continues to be, an important conversation about photography in New Zealand: whether, and in what ways, art can be made with the camera. Photographic responses to this conversation in New Zealand have often borrowed, built on, and adapted visual modes from broader photographic movements, such as ‘pictorialism’, ‘straight’ photography, and ‘documentary’ photography. Such movements are themselves imbued with a debate about photography's relationship to fine art. The employment of these modes as a means of visualising certain agendas within this conversation is visually traceable within the collection and confirmed within material published by the New Zealand Centre for Photography, New Zealand camera clubs, and other New Zealand photographic groups. These agendas have informed the visual treatment of themes explored within photographs from the collection. Within landscape photographs these themes include notions of relationship between people and the land, colonial histories, and the influence of place on social phenomena. Within the collection's portrait photographs, relationships within a diverse and changing society are explored through themes of childhood innocence, visual typification, and social circumstances. Photographs imaging elements of the human-made environment expand on social themes while expounding notions of observation and creation within image-making. The ways in which these themes are expressed may be understood as subtly different articulations of a range of approaches to conceiving photography's relationship to art. The visual concerns and explorations that the collection photographs convey are thus ingredients that have contributed to a medley of voices vying to determine and question whether, and in what ways, art can be made with the camera.