Striking Poses (Te Papa Exhibition - 12 March 2003 - 01 November 2003)

Striking Poses - New Zealand Portrait Photography was an exhibition of 160 studio portraits from New Zealand's past, featuring Maori and Europeans from the 1850s through to the 1970s. Many of these photographs had never been displayed publicly before.

The exhibition included the earliest types of photographs such as daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and cartes de visite. Sitters in these look serious, stiff and formal - not surprising given exposure times of several seconds and the Victorian disapproval of informality and frivolity.

The invention of the snapshot around 1900 gave people the option of taking their own portraits, but this did not replace the desire to visit the professional. The exhibition showed that while twentieth century styles of portrait photography become a little more relaxed, the artifice of the studio setting and the painfully self-conscious experience of posing is written clearly on the frozen faces of sitters.

Not all the photographs in Striking Poses were commissioned by the sitter. Nineteenth century photographers often induced Māori to pose and then mass-produced images of the sitters for sale. There was a strong European curiosity about this 'other culture' and many such images ended up in museums like Te Papa as part of ethnographic collections. By the early twentieth century the interest shifted to romantic images of Maori that could be co-opted to suggest a New Zealand identity. The Government Tourist Department, for example, commissioned and purchased photographs of pretty young women with titles like "A Maori Belle" for its promotions.

Photographic techniques became more sophisticated in the twentieth century. The exhibition featured work by photographers such as Spencer Digby and Ron Woolf who used artificial lighting to create dramatic or glamorous effects.