Te Hīkoi Toi: tourists of past and present

This article on Between shirt and skin: the portraits of William Harding and Splendid Photo’s 4th Birthday was originally published in the Dominion Post.

In 1977, Susan Sontag wrote in her prescient book On Photography, “Essentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people's reality, and eventually in one's own.” Photography makes us all voyeurs, Sontag argues, able to scrutinise and consume the lives of others.

Nearly two centuries on from its invention, photography also makes us tourists of the past in ways that weren’t imaginable for previous generations. We can see historical faces, places and technologies with ease and online immediacy. Yet does that mean we have a deeper understanding of history? Or does photography, in fact, make the past more unknowable and distant, because it shows us an illusive reality we’ll never fully understand?

An exhibition at the National Library Te Puna Mātauranga o Aotearoa, Between skin & shirt: the photographic portraits of William Harding, shuttles us between the states of knowing and not-knowing, and the past as something both palpably present and dimly distant.

William Harding worked as a ‘photographist’ in Whanganui. Between 1860 and 1889 he kept a studio on Ridgeway St where he made portraits of the Māori and Pākehā citizens of the town. His portraits are of people, and all the other things they brought into his studio to be photographed: dogs, bikes, sewing machines, guns, and other photographs. Harding made over 6500 portraits on glass-plate negatives, which were saved by a forward-thinking relative and finally acquisitioned by the Alexander Turnbull Library in 1948.

These images are radiant. A fascinating cast of characters stare out from their frames; half-smiling, frowning, asleep, hands clasped, defiant, or looking coyly over one shoulder. Some people have names that have managed to stick to their images and travel with them through time. The sweetly-named Miss Moon, for example, sits, her legs dangling, too short for the studio’s chair. But many of the subjects are unidentified, their faces adrift from any anchoring detail. In these images, photography pushes the past further away from us, by showing us what we’ll never know.

Harding’s portraits have been digitally scanned and then printed for this exhibition. Glass-plate negatives can capture tiny details and, especially printed in large format as they are here, you can see people’s smile lines, beard bristles, freckles, and the textures of their crinoline dresses and canvas shirts. This detail creates an intimacy between us, the viewers, and the subjects – but it’s an intimacy that only goes one way. They seem exposed, somehow, through this revealing detail. As Sontag argues, they are the spectacle and we are the tourists.

Harding’s photos are in the public domain, downloadable and accessible, and the National Library has an online exhibition to accompany this show. But this is also a great post-pandemic exhibition to go and see in person. The images, life-size, hung at head height, crisp in their glass-plate stillness and framed by the warped textures of the damaged negatives, are wonderful to look at in the quiet of the gallery, as real objects, not something on a screen.

Across town, there’s an exhibition at Meanwhile gallery upstairs on Willis St of contemporary photographers who are also drawn to the physicality of the medium. Splendid Photo is a store specialising in processing film and supplying analogue photography equipment. To celebrate its fourth birthday it has organised a group show of “40-ish” photographers who work in film.

It’s a nice way of drawing together a community of supporters interested in this niche practice. Nayte Rēweti’s work, ‘It's coarse and rough and irritating; and it gets everywhere’, has an interesting micro/macro visual bounce. Are we looking at a sand dune from far away, or right up close? And I loved the brooding menace of Phillipe Bradfield’s ‘Ngāuruhoe’.

But, saturated as we are in digital media, why would photographers use film in 2022? Perhaps the precision required in selecting and framing a moment, and capturing it on film, requires a higher level of attentiveness; a different way of looking. Film is limited and processing isn’t cheap.

Perhaps it’s also about not being a tourist in other people’s lives. Sontag’s words are 10 times more relevant today, when we spend hours scrolling our Instagram feeds, peering at people and sharing our selfies, than they were in 1971. Tellingly, most of the images in the Meanwhile exhibition don’t include people, and, if people are in the frame, they are blurred, far away, or turning from the camera. Could film photography, with its required time and process, make it, paradoxically, a private medium, a kind of anti-tourism? Or an act of care?