Tay Street, Invercargill, NZ

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

In the 1880s Invercargill was a boom town riding on its close proximity to the busy port at Bluff. When Hart, Campbell & Company opened a photographic studio in the city, they documented its growth by capturing buildings under construction on each side of the wide open streets. Identifiable buildings in this view of Tay Street (where the firm’s studio was situated) include an ironmonger and a baker sitting in a line of buildings that push into an expanse of white space made of street and sky. Signs of the city’s inhabitants and their movements can be seen in the wheel tracks and foot- and hoofprints breaking up the snow-covered ground.

This is of course a winter scene, one of Hart’s specialities as a photographer highly competent at managing unusual light levels and avoiding overexposure of his negatives. Hart was criticised for exhibiting ‘faked’ views of lake scenes by moonlight in the Dunedin Industrial Exhibition of 1881. Manipulating photographic negatives to create views that appeared to have been taken at night wasn’t unheard of. However, photography was regarded as valuable to the new colony as a means of truthful record, and by making a creative interpretation of a scene Hart opened himself up to accusations that his work was not then truthful, despite it being common knowledge that it was not then possible to photograph a landscape scene in moonlight.

In 1880 the Otago Witness newspaper reported on the growth in the number of tourists to the Wakatipu locale who had claimed that they had made the trip after seeing the photographs of the area by Hart, Campbell & Company exhibited in the Sydney International Exhibition of 1879.

Famed for his views of lake scenery, especially in the Wakatipu region, Hart regularly tested the limits of his photographic abilities in high altitudes and during extremely cold weather. Here Hart capitalises on the presence of weather conditions usually encountered in mountainous areas to create a view of Invercargill that looks alien and otherworldly, a city itself in the process of construction and, like a photographic negative, open to manipulation.

Lissa Mitchell