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Overview
Woman dressed in hooded cloak standing to the right of frame. He holds his arms extended, hands over a woman lying on her back with hands on chest.
This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025) on page 230.
The romantic theme that runs through pictorialism could be expressed in images of the exotic, mysterious and esoteric. Chapman-Taylor’s interests in Theosophy and astrology aligned well with this tendency and many of his images have a mystical tone. Some, like Spirit of mischief, allude to characters of fiction and mythology. Gaze’s photograph, The spell, seems influenced by the American photographer William Mortensen (1897–1965). Mortensen photographed for Hollywood film studios in the 1920s and 1930s and his images draw from the nightmarish German expressionist style that inspired so many monster movies of the time. He unashamedly explored themes of sexual submission, violence and crucifixion, the latter usually featuring naked women shackled and tormented by hooded figures. His most ambitious project was a picture history of witchcraft. Mortensen was hard to ignore on the international pictorialist stage, but if photographers in Aotearoa New Zealand were, like Gaze, influenced by him, they were unwilling to go down his more extreme path.