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Overview
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).
Electric studio lighting was not common until at least the mid-1920s. All images taken at Wellington’s Berry & Co studio were lit naturally, with a large bank of windows on the south side of the building providing a soft, even light source. Many customers would have chosen to receive their print in an oval mount, which had the effect of cropping the photograph. But these reproductions from the original glass-plate negatives show the images in full, allowing us to step into the scenes as they would have appeared before the photographer. Having the glass negatives allows us to see the reject shots too. An alternative negative of Dolly Sporle shows her face heavily retouched to remove all character and her son Leslie sharply focused. Clearly this was the version chosen, but the blurred reject image shown here has far more life in it. Stylistically, studio photographs from this period sit in a relaxed gap between the formal posing of the nineteenth century and the heavily directed, more artificial look that came into fashion from the 1930s onwards.