Peter Pan on Mt Eden

item details

NamePeter Pan on Mt Eden

ProductionJames Walter Chapman-Taylor; photographer; 1928; Auckland

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: 226mm (width), 282mm (height)

Registration NumberO.002438

Overview

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

James Walter Chapman-Taylor is best known as an architect of Arts and Crafts-style houses. This photograph was made in the grounds of his Auckland home, ‘Pan’s Garden’. After moving to the Hutt Valley in the 1930s Chapman-Taylor joined the Wellington Camera Club and became a stalwart of the club through the 1940s and up until his death, in 1958. ‘The picture that feeds the soul is one that reminds us beautifully of something we have known,’ he wrote — an elegant expression of the thread of nostalgia that runs through pictorialism.1

1 The Developer and Enlarger, vol.10, no.6, August 1947, cited in Judy Siers, The Life and Times of James Walter Chapman-Taylor, Millwood Heritage Productions, Napier, 2007, p.383.