Keri Pratt, Virginia, Violet Pratt, Queen St near Wyndham St, Auckland

item details

NameKeri Pratt, Virginia, Violet Pratt, Queen St near Wyndham St, Auckland

ProductionMurray Cammick; photographer; circa 1976; Auckland
Jenny Tomlin; printer; 2015

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

Materialssilver, photographic gelatin, photographic paper

Materials Summaryblack and white photograph, gelatin silver print

Techniquesblack-and-white photography

DimensionsImage: 382mm (width), 254mm (height)

Registration NumberO.043740

Credit linePurchased 2015

Overview

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

Today we have boy racers, but in the 1970s there was the V8 scene. Young people would come into Auckland’s Queen Street on a Friday and Saturday night to show off their Chevys and Fords from the 1950s or early 1960s and maybe drag each other off. Some were ‘do not touch’ hot rods and restorations, others were battered tanks. Murray Cammick became fascinated with this overlooked scene — to the point where he became a fixture of it himself, a role aided by regularly handing out photographs to his subjects. Late-night Queen Street was more than just cars though. Cammick met the glamorous Keri and Violet Pratt and friends on their nightly stroll from the Customs Steet Ca d’Oro coffee lounge to Mojo’s nightclub, opposite the Town Hall. ‘Their walk up Queen Street could cause a stir —high fashion, high platform heels and high as a kite’, recalls Cammick.1 But they too were more than happy to be photographed, posing like models and pleased to receive the prints Cammick posted to them.

1 ‘Gender’ 70s—Street photos by Murray Cammick’, photospacegallery.com/blog/gender-70s-street-photos-by-murray-cammick-photospace-gallery-6-dec-2024-1-feb-2025, accessed 10 January 2025.