Portrait of Tureiti Te Heuheu Tukino V

This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 189.

Tureiti Te Heuheu Tūkino V was paramount chief of the Tūwharetoa iwi and a strong advocate for the Kotahitanga movement, which established an independent Māori parliament in the 1890s. In 1918, he became a member of the government’s Legislative Council. This photograph is part of a sequence intended as studies for a painting by the German–New Zealand artist Wilhelm Dittmer, which explains why a man of such high standing has been photographed at some distance and without much thought for composition and background.1 Hamilton was keen to see a national Māori museum established, and envisaged portraits and sculptures of notable figures on display in an entrance hall. Hamilton has photographed Tureiti against a background of taonga Māori in a bid to draw a connection between a people and their material culture. But he did not seek items more specific to his subject’s tribal origins; these are not necessarily Tūwharetoa taonga.

1 Wilhelm Dittmer, Mana [portrait of Tureiti Te Heuheu Tukino V], oil on canvas, c.1904, Te Papa, 1992-0035-1252.