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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 100.
The Edwardian period, broadly from 1901 to 1914, was a time of prosperity and leisure. It was also a period of new technologies and mass production, epitomised by the postcard craze. At its peak in 1909, eight million cards were delivered in New Zealand by the post office. This excludes cards posted in envelopes, which could have been the same amount again, and cards never posted but simply collected and added to postcard albums. The scenes in these cards were all photo-graphed in black and white and then reproduced on a printing press with black ink. Additional printing plates applied broad patches of coloured ink to different parts of the scene besides the black ink that defined the image, creating a hand-coloured look.