January 15, 2024
Returned photographs are a Pandora’s box of Māori history.
Full interview click here
A library curator says the return of archived photographs gives New Zealanders a glimpse into a world that otherwise would have been lost or forgotten.
In December, 5300 photographs of numerous key figures in Māoridom from the multi million photo Fairfax Corporation’s archive were hand returned to Wellington following their purchase from The Duncan Miller Gallery, an American photography gallery in Los Angeles.
The photographs were sent to Los Angeles in 2013 to be digitised, however the company responsible for digitising the pictures went into liquidation and all assets were seized, including the millions of archive pictures.
Paul Diamond, the Curator for Māori at the Alexander Turnbull Library in Wellington says these images have the potential to help give context to national and localised Māori history.
“I think there’s really great potential for these images to be a good resource for teachers and students doing research for projects and things because the curriculum has a big emphasis on Māori history, but also place based history, asking the students to think about what happened in the places they live and where they kura are. So I think there’s great potential for that, as well. And as I said, using things like Digital New Zealand, Papers Past who sort of connect, because that’s the exciting thing about research these days, is that you can connect all these sources with each other because the sources don’t stand on their own and the context, you know, knowing oh right, that’s the event that was mentioned in that oral history interview with that kaumātua. And that’s a photo of that and it was also covered in the newspaper. And here’s the reference in the book, it says linking that stuff together,” he says.