Through Shaded Glass

In 2023 I was invited to launch Lissa Mitchell’s landmark book Through Shaded Glass, published by Te Papa Press.

Tēnā koutou katoa, ko Caroline McQuarrie ahau

I am incredibly honoured to be have been asked to launch Lissa Mitchell’s beautiful book ‘Through Shaded Glass’ tonight. I’m an artist for whom photography is a core part of my practice, and a Senior Lecturer teaching photography at Whiti o Rehua School of Art at Massey University. I’m also chair of the Peter Turner Lecture committee who invited Lissa to give the lecture this evening and have been part of the team organising the related symposium happening on Saturday.

Like many women who work in photography, I have a number of stories where I was made to feel that our industry is a boys club. I first studied photography in the 1990s, first at high school with an art teacher who was well versed in this country’s art history, then at art school at Canterbury University. I don’t remember specifically learning about female photographers who had come before me (in fact we didn’t formally learn any photographic history from this country) but I did take notice when I came across them, and so by the time I graduated I had some knowledge of women photographing here within the art sphere from the 1970s through to the 1990s. I knew about Laura Mulvey’s theory of The Male Gaze and I understood that it was important to have women behind the camera in order to counter it. I don’t think I ever thought directly about it, but if I had I would have imagined that there were few women photographing in this country prior to the 1970s, based simply on what I had come across.

30 years later we are living in a time where received histories of all kinds are being questioned, and sometimes re-written. As a country we are re-considering the popularly told stories we have known as our history, and it is right that this should happen in our field as in others. As Lissa writes in her introduction:

The contribution of women to these enterprises has been overlooked in New Zealand photographic histories to date.

This book is also timely because it connects with efforts around the world to redress the lack of acknowledgement of women’s contribution to the visual arts more widely, and to photography specifically. In just a couple of examples; in the UK the Fast Forward project and the V&A’s Parasol Photography Project are both supporting contemporary practitioners alongside championing historic practitioners. While the Florida based Women Photographers International Archive has a mission to “highlight the contributions of women photographers to modern and contemporary art in order to rewrite the artistic canon and provoke social change.” ‘Through Shaded Glass’ will be a resource not only for those of us living in this country, but contribute to the international conversation. It is fitting that this project emerges from our national museum, but also that in Lissa’s primary research she has visited so many small and medium sized museums and archives around the country to research people and find material outside of the larger centres.

Which brings me to one of the things I loved most while reading this book. So often, the individual women we know from history are the exceptions – the ones who somehow succeeded despite all the barriers put in their way. These women are of course commendable, but the way their stories have been told often creates a dichotomy between them and all the other women who get jammed into a homogenous, much more ordinary whole. The reality of course is more akin to an iceberg, the famous women being the tip of a larger group of people. ‘Through Shaded Glass’ attempts to re-dress some of that imbalance in the photographic field by demonstrating how it was ordinary women picking up cameras, working in studios and darkrooms, engaging in photographic societies, and writing about photography, who contributed right alongside their male counterparts. Lissa again:

Such accounts have focused on creating a narrative of great photographers – of master makers – who were documenting the colonization of Māori and, pre-eminently, the landscape – recording change, ownership and progress and, later, lamenting lost heritage. Lurking in the wings though, are the stories of collaborative working practices and the women who, as part of family businesses, were driven and determined makers of photography.’

This is scholarship genuinely engaged with both photography as a practice and with social history. Photography is perhaps the visual art form most entwined in our everyday lives. ‘Through Shaded Glass’ both recognises and honours this connection. Photography isn’t seen as separate from the world or simply reflecting it; photography is enmeshed in the world - all the world, whether it be domestic or afar, pākehā or Māori, happening in homes or studios. Lissa has spent over a decade being a detective hunting out hidden stories, and what amazing detective work she has done.

Lissa herself, I’m sure, would want me to mention that she did not do this work alone. Her acknowledgements are extensive and through them it is possible to see how widely she networked to both find material, and to ensure her approach to presenting it was exemplary. But even with this acknowledged it has to be said that this is a tremendous individual achievement made by an author and historian who has been determined and dedicated.

With chapters titled ‘The Photographic Studios’, ‘In Business’, ‘The Art of Studio Photography’, ‘Being Modern’, ‘Homemade’, and ‘On the Move’, a wide variety of subjects are covered. On first encounter the great joy of this book for me was the photographs themselves. Richly illustrated, ‘Through Shaded Glass’ is a treasure trove, details of life leap off the pages. I particularly enjoyed the chapter ‘Homemade’ in which we see the ‘amateur’ photographs of domestic and everyday life. The insights into how people lived show us how there were both differences and similarities to our own lives. Christmas portraits, children playing on rugs on the lawn, groups cooking food around a campfire and visits to beautiful parts of the country don’t look so different from what you might find today in a phone’s camera reel. Other imagery speaks more to the times; bicycling clubs, wicker prams, ceramic flagons, boys in sailor suits and guards of honour in old fashioned uniforms. In fact the clothing people wear is a particular joy for me, especially seeing the difference between the formal garb worn to the professional photographic studio and the more “casual” outfits worn by those photographed at home.

What becomes apparent however is that most of the photographers included in ‘Through Shaded Glass’ were highly skilled practitioners. While I find the amateur photos fascinating, they provide a good counterpoint to the technically impressive images that run through all the chapters. Seeing sumptuous reproductions of photos by Jessie Buckland, Alice Brusewitz, Una Garlick, Thelma Kent, Rose Frank and Elizabeth Greenwood to name only a few is a genuine treat. Their subjects are varied, there is no one thing women photographed. Like men, they were out and about in the world turning their cameras on whatever interested them.

There are moments of personal pleasure too – although these will be different for other people. For me it is references to my home region Te Tai Poutini, the West Coast of the South Island. Seeing Gladys Goodall’s photo of the then-new Cape Foulwind Cement Works in the 1950s gives me an eerie echo of young Otautahi based photographer Hannah Watkinson’s imagery of the same site now closed and abandoned in her recent book ‘The Near Future’. I am impressed by Jessie Westland (and a little tickled that her name seems so fitting) and her forays into the Southern Alps during the late 1800s where she photographed with her husband James, carrying the cameras themselves rather than leaving them to the porters in case of damage. And finally I come to Agnes Williamson. I’m particularly partial to Agnes because it was on a research trip to Reefton and the nearby Blacks Point Museum a number of years ago that I found a photo with Agnes’s studio label on it. I photographed it and send it to Lissa and she followed up with research that uncovered Agnes’s story which involves a family inheritance for her and her sister, and a brother in law who took control of their money and lost it, leaving them with the debt.

‘Through Shaded Glass’ is full of not only photos, but stories too, and it is these that give the final pleasure. Some are stories of triumph, some, like Agnes’s, of difficulty. But almost all are stories of determination. As Lissa writes:

(This book’s) deliberate focus is on individuals, not to argue for them as exceptional, but rather to combat anonymity and generalisations, particularly in the case of working class women’

I could talk all night about these wonderful stories, but that would only rob you of the joy of reading them yourself. So I will just add one final thing.

This is a really important book, on multiple levels. Firstly, it’s important internationally that this country is engaging in the same work happening around the globe to redress imbalances that have existed for so long. Secondly it is important nationally, that as part of current efforts to re-assess, and for many re-learn, the narratives of our history that these contributions to the building of this country, and to photography within it are recognised. Thirdly it is important to our field to have these stories ‘recovered’. It is important to individual practitioners like myself that we are able to position ourselves within a continuum that goes back to the very beginnings of our medium. And finally, but perhaps most vitally, it is important for the generations who follow, who will hopefully grow into a world where it seems inconceivable that these stories and others like them weren’t known. What an incredible gift Lissa has given to us all.

Nō reira, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa