Abstract:
This, the first authoritative history of New Zealand photography of the Great War, treats photography as a critical benchmark against which New Zealanders have measured their vision of war. During the early decades of the twentieth century there was a quantitative and qualitative increase in the use of photography to ‘picture’ war and society. Four factors are crucial to understanding the impact of this process on the way New Zealanders visualized war. First, there was a two-way traffic in photographs between the battle front and the home front. Second, during the war photography, as the most technologically advanced form of image production, colonized, expanded and technologically united the entire range of visual representational genres. Third, photographs were ideally suited to mark absence and mass death. Photographs were invested with unforeseen emotional meanings and were put to changing public and private use. Understanding their utilization helps us picture mourning as an ongoing and complex cultural phenomenon and pushes the boundaries of a history of wartime photography out beyond the war years themselves. Finally, the war years gave rise to other kinds of photographic practice which took as their subject matter the bodies of the wounded soldiers. Photographic representations of the dead became central to post-war memory practices, but only certain kinds of photographs were suitable for these representations. Images of the wounded were too shocking (too visceral even) for easy incorporation into memory. Photographs need to be understood as forms of evidence - constructed, contingent, open to interpretation - and not mere illustrations. Motivated by a desire to demonstrate the value of photographs to the study of history, this thesis seeks to simultaneously analyse their pictorial qualities - as images, with independent aesthetic and compositional codes - and their status as cultural artefacts conditioned by time, place and sensibility. Giving centrality of place to the photographic representations reveals New Zealanders’ imaginative geography of wartime, and provides a deeper understanding of the war’s cultural significance, better explaining the traumatic as well as heroic memories that flow from this war and its place in our national history.