Jill Haley: The Colonial Family Album: Māori and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Otago скачать в хорошем качестве

Jill Haley: The Colonial Family Album: Māori and Photography in Nineteenth-Century Otago

With the start of British settlement in New Zealand, the indigenous Māori were caught in a period of transition and a surging tide of modernity. By the 1820s, sealers and whalers had settled at the bottom of New Zealand’s South Island and formed relationships with women of the local Kāi Tahu tribe. Their mixed-ancestry children were faced with increasing British influence, first with missionaries and then immigrants to the New Zealand Company’s Otago settlement established in 1848. These newcomers brought British goods, technology, practices, and knowledge, and Kāi Tahu became immersed in a British-colonial world that reshaped their lives. Rather than resisting the new influences or being subsumed by them, many Kāi Tahu incorporated aspects of British life into their traditional Māori customs and constructed a new identity. Photography was one of the British practices that Kāi Tahu embraced in their changed world. This paper considers how Kāi Tahu used photography to shape and communicate their new colonial identity through a case study of a single photograph album. Compiled by the Parata family, a financially advantaged and politically elite mixed-ancestry family, this album offers the opportunity to explore Kāi Tahu engagement with photography. As soon as commercial portrait studios appeared in the Otago colony in the mid-1860s, Kāi Tahu went to have their likenesses taken. The photographs they commissioned of themselves followed the same portrait conventions as British immigrants and bore little resemblance to the ethnographic “type” photographs of Māori produced by professional studios for the commercial market. Photography enabled Kāi Tahu to participate in modern British living, but it also tapped into elements of traditional Māori culture and values, allowing the old Māori world and new British one to be expressed simultaneously. Through photography, Kāi Tahu constructed a new British colonial identity. Paper presented as part of the "Photography and Britishness" conference held at the Yale Center for British Art, 4–5 November 2016. This conference was co-organized by the Yale Center for British Art, New Haven; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London; and The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, San Marino.