item details
NameCats; inscribed 'Wellington Cat Show'
ProductionSpencer Digby Studios; photography studio; 10 June 1961; Wellington
Classificationgelatin silver negatives, black-and-white negatives
Materialssilver, photographic gelatin, black-and-white film, roll film
Materials SummaryBlack and white film negative
Techniquesblack-and-white photography
Registration NumberF.014897
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).
Photographing cat shows was all part of the job for the Woolf family, who from 1960 ran the Wellington studio originally founded by Spencer Digby. Their negatives record large numbers of individual cats sitting in cages, but it is the photographs with people that are more interesting. They reveal not only how the competitions were social events, but also the relationships people had with their pets.