Sixty years ago, Queen Elizabeth II is crowned (2 June 1953) Only selected officials were invited into Westminster Abbey to witness the formal coronation ceremony, so thousands of people lined the route of the coronation porcession in order to see the Queen. Robert Buhler’s lithograph (above) depicts part of theRead more
Sixty years ago, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first people to reach the summit of Mount Everest, the world’s tallest mountain (29 May 1953) The two men’s mountaineering triumph came just a few days before Queen Elizabeth II was crowned. Their feat boosted the rejoicing that was already takingRead more
Last week, along with 15 other people from museums and galleries around New Zealand who work with photographic collections, I attended a course on the care and identification of photographic prints and negatives. The course was taken by Gawain Weaver, a photographic conservator from San Francisco and he also gaveRead more
A team from the Discovery Centres recently spent nine Wednesday afternoons together with nine awesome tamariki (children) in a trial run of Te Papa’s first after school club. Through the after school club we wanted to learn, together with the tamariki, about the stories Te Papa tells. We also wantedRead more
For me the new year is an opportunity to stop for a moment and reflect on the achievements of the past year. Today my focus has been on Te Papa’s Kiwi Faces of World War I project where we have been identifying soldiers in a collection of negatives taken atRead more
Te Papa has a collection of nearly 4,000 glass plate and film negatives taken by the Wellington photography studio Berry & Co. The studio was founded by William Berry in 1897, and operated in Cuba St until 1931. The negatives are mainly portraits – of families, children, men and women,Read more
It is not often I come across early photographs that capture pure joy like this one does. Too young to find the serious appeals of the photographer’s command to “keep still” anything other than funny, this infant boy’s laughter dominates the image and projects a good sense of fun aboutRead more
One of the fascinating aspects of the Berry & Co photographs of World War I soldiers is that they were often photographed with family and friends. These family photographs bring to the fore the fact that women and children were affected by the war. Life on the home front wasRead more
Te Papa has an enormous collection of photographs, negatives and transparencies by Brian Brake (1927 – 88), one of New Zealand’s best known photographers. Brake became famous while working overseas as a photojournalist – one of his best known works is the Monsoon photo essay, which he took in 1960. Read more
Sometimes when I look at photographs, I start imagining the past. Details in the images trigger memories of people and places lost to time. These images of water towers take me back to my childhood in Invercargill, where the sight and purpose of the large tower, visible from most partsRead more
Perhaps you know where some of the photographs below were taken? If you can help, please note the number related to each image with your comment below. Click on the images to enable enlargement. 1) Its summer here… 2) North Island wharf 3) Is it Otago harbour? And if so,Read more
In my last post I touched on the shipwreck of the Dundonald on Disappointment Island in 1907, and the rescue of its survivors by the Hinemoa when she was taking scientists to the Auckland Islands. The Auckland Islands were on a major shipping route, but the available charts were not always accurate,Read more
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 areRead more
One of the amazing things about researching the Berry and Co portraits is that with each identification comes new insight into World War 1. The stories behind the people and their experiences make what happened during the war more real and personal. One image in particular pulled at my heart-stringsRead more
I’ve been enjoying our scientists’ fieldwork posts. We have scientists’ photographs from several historic field trips in the photography collection. My favourites are in this photo album from the 1907 Expedition to the Subantarctic Islands. The Expedition was initiated by the Canterbury Philosophical Institute with support from the Government, andRead more
