Design for bookplate

item details

NameDesign for bookplate

ProductionFrank Hofmann; photographer; circa 1945

Classificationblack-and-white prints, gelatin silver prints, black-and-white photographs, works of art

Materialsphotographic paper, silver, photographic gelatin

Materials Summaryblack and white photograph, gelatin silver print

Techniquesblack-and-white photography

DimensionsImage: 155mm (width), 208mm (height)

Registration NumberO.033222

Credit linePurchased 2010 with the assistance of Andrew and Jenny Smith

Overview

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).

Frank Hofmann came to New Zealand in 1940 from Czechoslovakia, where, as a member of the progressive Prague Photographic Society, he had been exposed to the New Photography movement. From 1941 to 1947, he worked in the studio of Auckland photographer Clifton Firth, who liked dramatic lighting of the sort used to photograph Hollywood movie stars of the period. Here, Hofmann has distilled the technique into an image about lighting itself — a sort of photographer’s photograph. Shadows and patterns of light have the same substance as real objects; reality and illusion become hard to separate. Is it the table lamp or its shadow that is projecting the pool of light? How is it that the lighting unit at top right appears to be throwing a circle of blackness? When the eye attempts to unravel the image, it ends up getting stuck on the lack of information about depth. In the end, we have to accept the photograph as simultaneously a flat abstraction and an image of three-dimensional reality — exactly one of the effects seen in much European New Photography.