A while back I posted Marion Queenie Kirker’s image of a ‘nodding cat’. Recently the rest of her negatives were scanned and uploaded to the museum’s database.
One of the things I enjoy about working in the museum is helping to make images like this available to be seen. There are no prints from these negatives in the collection so up until they were scanned it was only possible to view them as negative images. Now they can be seen as if for the first time (or at least the first time in about 70 years!).
Kirker was born in Auckland in 1879. During the late 1930s she went to London and trained and exhibited as a photographer. She became an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain. I am yet to find out whether she continued making photographs on her return to New Zealand but it appears she did not.
Amongst Kirker’s negatives are some unusual and unsettling portraits:
