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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).
In 1924, Harry Moult helped form the Wellington Camera Circle, a radical group dedicated to pictorial photography that broke away from the local photographic society. On a trip to the United Kingdom in the late 1920s, he commissioned a large set of carbon prints from his best negatives. Unlike conventional black-and-white prints, made using the silver gelatin process, long-lasting carbon prints allowed for easy manipulation of tone and were printed with ink, which could be any colour of the photographer’s choosing. Moult’s prints caused a sensation when shown at the New Zealand Academy of Fine Arts in Wellington. ‘Softness, yet with conspicuous detail, is to be found in all the prints,’ reported the Evening Post. ‘Only in one or two instances does the “fuzziness”, which some amateur photographers look upon as the essence of their art, obtrude, and then not unnecessarily. Clear detail in shadows and softened high lights are conspicuous . . .’1
1 ‘Beautiful prints’, Evening Post, 1 September 1930, p.11.