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This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).
This photographic album was made as an expression of love. It was photographed, compiled and given by George Leslie Adkin to his future wife, Maud Herd, as a Christmas present in 1910. The couple (aged twenty-two and twenty) had met the previous year, after the Herd family moved to a farm near the Adkins’. The album contains photographs related to experiences that the couple shared in the first year they knew each other. It would have been a special gift — the product of many hours’ taking, developing, assembling and captioning all the pages of photographs. It is also an example of the ‘new album’ — a term that describes a style and format of album-making that emerged in the 1890s in which photographs were taken purely for the purpose of creating a record for personal and not commercial use.
The album contains a mix of candid snapshots and more thought-out posed compositions, including scenes from an outing undertaken by the courting couple, family and friends the previous Christmas, a Boxing Day picnic. Having arrived at Hōkio Beach, the group poses in front of a local landmark, the remains of the cargo ship Hydrabad, wrecked when it was blown onto Waitārere Beach, near Levin, during a storm back in 1878. The group is spread out in an arrangement that appears to span the length of the wreck, which is stuck as if listing seaward, with its remaining cross-shaped mast tilted backwards and seemingly gesturing at the vastness beyond.
Adkin was a dedicated amateur photographer and album-maker, and his interest in the photographic process and thoughtful execution is evident in the albums and photographs held by Te Papa. The family scenes and their captions convey and celebrate the depth of love and commitment the couple had to each other over the course of their lifelong marriage and to their family. After the formality and professionalism of nineteenth-century photographic albums, Adkin’s albums are fine examples of how emotion and humour entered photographic practice via amateur photographers.
Lissa Mitchell