Waterfront

item details

NameWaterfront

ProductionGeorge Ward; photographer; circa 1960; Wellington

Classificationgelatin silver prints, black-and-white prints, black-and-white photographs, works of art

Materialssilver, photographic gelatin, photographic paper, mounting board

Materials Summaryphotograph, gelatin silver print

Techniquesblack-and-white photography

DimensionsImage: 369mm (width), 290mm (height)

Registration NumberO.042721

Credit lineGift of William and Jill Main, 2014

Overview

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 255.

George Ward’s photographs, taken in Wellington, look modernist, but they also carry pictorialist values within them. Ward titles his depiction of the newly-constructed Freyberg Pool Dark pavilion, inserting a romantic suggestion that seems at odds with the building’s modernist angularity, openness and light-filled spaces. His image of the waterfront, taken from the Taranaki Street Wharf, is all industrial and striking in its intrusion of foreground over distance. It seems a long way from Ward’s other images of watery reflections of fishing boats at rest in the inner wharves and sailboats moored in a boat harbour — both long-time favourites of artists and amateur photographers alike. Yet, it too is an image made to please rather than to challenge the eye. Together, Ward’s photographs demonstrate the sometimes blurred line between pictorialism and modernism, and the tendency of the first to co-opt the appearance of the second.