Book of the Week: The female gaze

2026-03-24 - 16:54

What was she thinking? Sometime in the 1890s commercial photographer and nurse Margaret Matilda White draped a kahu huruhuru (feather cloak) over her stiff Victorian collar, drew a moko kauae on her chin and clicked her way into photographic history. White worked at what was then known as the Avondale Lunatic Asylum – as a photographer she is best known for the subdued, strangely mannered images of her fellow staff – but in this self-portrait her gaze is direct, her mouth held into something resembling... a smile? White’s photograph might have been considered sympathetic to Māori at the time, writes Te Papa curator of historical photography Lissa Mitchell in Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau, the catalogue for the exhibition of the same name currently on at our national museum, but a contemporary reading would “differ significantly’” It sure would. But, as Mitchell explains in her lengthy essay, photographs are not mere visual facsimiles for the past. Rather, they tell us about the values and attitudes of the time – values that, over the first century of photography in New Zealand, not only ignored tikanga Māori but also failed to acknowledge female and non-binary photographers. Slow Burn, a small, elegant, beautifully illustrated catalogue comprising all 170 works in the exhibition, sets out to put the record straight. It is based on two slightly different rationale. The first is to shine a spotlight on more recent collecting by Te Papa. Here she succeeds brilliantly, curating a collection of images from the mid-1970s to the present day showcasing the extraordinary depth and breadth of photography by women and non-binary artists. Across silver gelatin prints, colour ink jet formats, Polaroid SX-70 photos, Instax prints, photobook spreads, stills from moving images and the more recent return to analogue black and white photography, Slow Burn pulls together over half a century of provocative, memorable, known and new photography. These are divided into four sections. ‘‘Joyriders Rere Ao’ documents images of community, play and social interactions, including West Auckland photographerEdith Amituanai’s large colour images of teens hanging out in their urban spaces; Nela Fletcher’s stagey occupations of industrial buildings and empty playgrounds; works from Anne Noble’s renowned ‘Ruby’s Room’ series, high-colour depictions of her daughter’s mouth filled with bubble-gum or bearded with bathtime bubbles; and the remarkable large-format Taniwha by Tia Ranginui – a home-grown suburban iteration of a mythic apparition here bounded by a fenced horizon and fake-looking grass. ‘Nighthawks Rere Pō’ brings together expressions of gender diversity, performance and daring intimacy including the glam seductiveness of Lisa Rehina’s Diva from her ‘Digital Marae’ series; the pared back eroticism of Fiona Pardington’s Bracelet and Tiara; the dark theatricality of Christine Webster’s life-size ‘Black Carnival’ series of Cibachome prints; Di ffrench’s shimmery appropriations of the male gaze of traditional art; and Fiona Clark’s postured portraits of Auckland’s trans scene (as she said in Lula Cucchiara’s excellent 2021 documentary Fiona Clark: Unafraid, “I think posing is underrated”). ‘Ancestor Technologies Hangarau Tūpuna’ gathers together works connecting history, memory and neglected places, such as Natalie Robertson’s haunting series of forgotten or devastated waterways on the east coast of the North Island; Stella Brennan’s atmospheric scans of 120-year-old glass plate negatives from her family archive, faded, cracked and dotted with mould; the fine staginess of Margaret Dawson’s Woman outside the house with flowers; a performance accompanying Ann Shelton’s The physical garden, bold still lifes of herbs and flowers used traditionally in the control of conception, menstruation and abortion; and Conor Clarke’s Parnell Rose Garden (described by Rhonda Comins),a photograph of a single rose overlaid by a braille panel and an audio description: “Occasionally I notice something that could be a rose. It looks like a screwed-up tissue caught in the barren, very prickly cut-back stalks...” ‘The Near Future Anamata’ comprises intimate, fragmented moments, as in the everyday domesticity and seemingly chance family photographs by Dinah Bradley; Janet Bayly’s shadowy depictions of Oriental Bay architecture; Elizabeth Leyland’s dramatic chiaroscuro of buildings and objects made strange by the night; the gentle rhythms of rural life in Sara McIntyre’s record of her days as a nurse in the King Country. Woman outside the house with flowers, from the series ‘Dreams and Illusions’, Margaret Dawson, 1986. Cibachrome print, 1300 x 1000 mm. Purchased 1986 with Harold Beauchamp Collection funds. Te Papa (O.003631). The demands of space clearly limited the number of artists able to be shown – Yvonne Todd, Bridgit Anderson, Yuki Kihara, Megan Jenkinson and Ava Seymour are all in the collection but missing from Slow Burn (a more glaring omission is the remarkable work of Auckland-based artist Louisa Afoa, absent from Te Papa’s collection altogether). But the second rationale for the book and catalogue is more ambiguous. While the exhibition provides that chance to “bring these photographs out of the storeroom and into conversation with each other,” Mitchell writes, the project began, she says, by acknowledging the underrepresentation of women and non-binary artists in Te Papa’s collections. Over years of researching, collecting and writing about photography, she adds, “I have often wondered where the women were.” This was the impetus behind Mitchell’s 2023 book Through Shaded Glass: Women and photography in Aotearoa New Zealand 1860–1960, in which she rescues professional, commercial and amateur women photographers from art historical obscurity, revealing a remarkable story of queer photography, women-only commercial practices and co-operative models of making photography. The goals of both these publications are admirable – in architecture, science, exploration and art in general, researchers have been working to revise those histories that have long ignored the contribution of women. But where Mitchell’s first book retrieved women photographers working before 1960 from relative obscurity, most of the artists featured in Slow Burn are neither unknown or unacknowledged – clearly they are all collected by our main museum. Our national museum itself has spent the last 50 years or so proclaiming its commitment to photography, including women’s photography. In 1982, Te Papa’s art predecessor, the National Art Gallery, toured Views/Exposures: 10 Contemporary New Zealand Photographers, a landmark exhibition curated by Peter Ireland and featuring a deliberate 50-50 balance of female and male artists including Anne Noble, Dinah Bradley, Fiona Clark, Gillian Chaplin and Janet Bayly (once selected, the artists were free to choose which works they submitted – all were then purchased by the gallery). As NAG director Luit Bieringa wrote in the accompanying publication, the book and the exhibition “is the result of a decision by the National Art Gallery to commit itself to an active programme of photographic purchases.” The magnificent New Zealand Photography Collected by Te Papa photography curator Athol McCredie, re-published last year, also draws on the Te Papa collection, including many photographers featured in Slow Burn. As Te Papa chief executive Courtney Johnston writes in the foreword of that book, “While continuing to care for and fill gaps in photography from the past, our curatorial team have had a deliberate and proactive strategy of addressing historical imbalances and oversights, and increasing representation of women photographers, Māori and Pasifika artists, and LGBTQI+ perspectives.” Johnston reiterates this in her foreword to Slow Burn which reflects, she writes, “Te Papa’s commitment to building collections and undertaking research that represent the full spectrum of artistic expression and thus of human experience.” Many dealer galleries, while not covered in this publication, are similarly committed to photography, including that by women and non-binary artists. At the time of writing, Autochromes by Yvonne Todd has recently finished at Peter McLeavey Gallery, Plain Sight by Sara McIntyre is on at Anna Miles Gallery, Anne Noble’s Canterbury Landscape has recently opened at Jonathan Smart Gallery in Christchurch (Noble’s major exhibition Unutai e! Unutai e!, documenting Ngāi Tahu’s claim for rangatiratanga over wai māori in its region, is currently on at Christchurch Art Gallery). Fiona Pardington (Kāi Tahu, Kāti Mamoe, Ngāti Kahungunu, Clan Cameron of Erracht), is representing New Zealand at this year’s Venice Biennale. Of course, the space given to women and non-binary artists by our national institutions, dealer galleries and publishing houses should continue to grow, but the real value in bringing these works out of the Te Papa storeroom and setting them up in proximity to each – on the page or on the gallery wall – is in the distinctive lens they apply to our communities, to us. As Mitchell writes, “Listening in to these conversations, what can they tell us?” Art historian Kirsty Baker asked this question in her 2024 book Sight Lines: Women and Art in Aotearoa New Zealand. How, she writes, “have women used their art-making to explore their relationships to land, to water, to nation? How have these women expanded the parameters of art-making, pushing up against and moving beyond disciplinary boundaries? How have they used their artistic practice to speak back to the exclusions and limits of art, its histories and its institutions?” Slow Burn responds to all these questions. In Natalie Robertson’s collaboration with Ngāti Porou, in Abhi Chinniah’s two outstanding large-format, colour portraits of migrant women in traditional dress, gazing at the viewer from a scraggly rural landscape, in the wonder of a braille panel overlaying a photograph of a rose in Conor Clarke’s Parnell Rose Garden we are invited to look anew at ourselves, our places and our changing values and attitudes. Nearly a century after White took a knotty self-portrait as a Māori wahine, Edith Amituanai’s large format inkjet prints and 100 Instax mini prints, part of her 2015-2017 ‘ETA’ (Edith’s Talent Agency) series, acknowledges the co-operative process required in documenting a community with which she is involved. The camera gets shared around, there are selfies and exhibition openings, someone takes a photo of the photographer, someone else dresses up as the artist negotiates the interactions between her and her people. “I’m trying to stack up this ongoing relationship of microinteractions,” she says in an interview with art dealer Anna Miles, “in exchange for one picture or a hundred pictures, whatever. One trade – it’s more like thousands of them.” Slow Burn Ahi Tāmau by Lissa Mitchell (Te Papa Press, $35) is available in bookstores nationwide.