Sophia, Charles, and Stella Zachariah. From the album: Photographs

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

Joseph Zachariah, known as ‘Zak’, was a Wellington photographer who specialised in studio portraiture. Between 1907 and 1915 he also became renowned for his photographs of newsworthy events, but he clearly developed his strong technical ability before then. It is rare to see indoor photographs in domestic environments —and certainly of spontaneous antics like these —so early. At the turn of the twentieth century, both film and plates were relatively insensitive to light. According to photo historian William Main, Zak used magnesium flash powder to light the dark interior of his living quarters, where both of these photographs were taken. This spectacular and dangerous technique would have filled the room with dense white smoke. But if Zak’s brother and sisters, pictured in both photographs, were perturbed by the pyrotechnics to come, they hid it well.