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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).
In 1907, the Philosophical Institute of Canterbury organised a twenty-six-man scientific expedition to visit the subantarctic Snares, Campbell and Auckland island groups. The main aim of the expedition was to extend the magnetic survey of New Zealand further south, but botanists, geologists and zoologists were also part of the scientific party. The creator of this lantern slide, the naturalist and ornithologist Geoffrey Buddle, probably made it by copying an original negative. Buddle has added a mask to the slide, to frame it for projection onto a screen. There is something poignant in the circular shape — a sense of looking down the telescope of time at a bird looking back at us.