Group sitting in a field

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 59.

Amateur photographers have always enjoyed clowning around with the camera. This photograph has had its negative retouched so the three women, who are almost identically dressed (they could be sisters), sit quite intimately with two men who have been transformed into skeletons. Was this just a joke, or an act of revenge or spite? With no information on the photographer or the subjects we will probably never know. The retouching is crude, with black ink applied on the upper side of the glass negative, so it could be scraped off to reveal the two men. This would return us to the image made in the camera, but would irrevocably destroy its subsequent reworking, which is part of its historical meaning as well.