Overview
Three works entitled Vanessa, Army, and Huri-waka made by Lisa Reihana (Ngāi Tū, Ngāti Hine, Ngā Puhi) in 2003 were acquired by Te Papa in 2005.
These works are from a series of six images entitled Granite Portraits. To create the images, Reihana took stills from her earlier multimedia work Native Portraits n. 19897 also held in the Te Papa art collection, and laser photo-etched them on granite. The resulting images have the look of daguerreotype prints and embody the idea of photographs as sites of memory. '
Reihana created Native Portraits n. 19897 for Te Papa's opening in 1997. In this digital piece, she used studio photographs from the 1800s to explore Maori concepts of time, identity, and representation alongside ideas about history, tourism, and technology. The work - both a personal whakapapa (genealogy) and a critique of historical photographic practices - united communities past and present. The Granite Portraits' of Vanessa, Army, and Huri-waka extend those ideas and signals a shift in Reihana's practice from moving images to still photography.