Michael Joseph Savage

item details

NameMichael Joseph Savage

ProductionSpencer Digby Studios; photography studio; March 1936; Wellington

Classificationblack-and-white negatives, gelatin silver negatives, studio portraits

Materialssilver, photographic gelatin, black-and-white film, cut film

Materials SummaryBlack and white film negative

Techniquesblack-and-white photography

Registration NumberB.080642/03

Credit lineSpencer Digby / Ronald D Woolf Collection. Gift of Ronald Woolf, 1975

Overview

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

On 9 March 1936 at 2.30pm, Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage called into the studio of Wellington photographer Spencer Digby to have his portrait taken. It was a very short session, squeezed in while Savage was travelling from parliament to government house, where he was to meet with the governor-general. His schedule allocated just thirty minutes for the journey. After travel time, he must have had barely ten minutes at the studio. But it was enough to produce probably the most famous photograph ever taken in New Zealand, with Savage’s genial face going on to adorn the walls of many homes across the country. Savage had become prime minister in the landslide election victory of late 1935 that established the very first Labour Government. To mark parliament’s first sitting in March 1936 after the election, the popular Weekly News magazine commissioned the portrait and published it full-page. The magazine later reprinted it in two tones when Savage died at the height of his popularity in 1940.