Two women

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 41.

Stage performers in Edwardian times were often photographed with their hair down like these two, but it was never considered proper for most women. An exception might be for ‘artistic’ images, where subjects could step outside the usual boundaries of everyday life. James and Nellie Hemus owned the Hemus Sarony Studio. James travelled to the United States and Canada in 1906 to view recent photographic developments, and on his return must have been considered an authority, for the Lyttelton Times asked his opinion on the pictorial photography included in the New Zealand International Exhibition held in Christchurch later that year.1 He expressed approval of impressionistic photography, provided it was conceived at the time of taking and not introduced in a ‘patched on’ manner to the print. Although this photograph is not impressionistic, it is artistically staged in a more sophisticated manner than bread-and-butter studios of the time would have offered.

1 ‘Pictorial photography: Interview with Mr Hemus Sarony [sic]’, Lyttelton Times, 13 November 1907, p. 7.