Q&A with Athol McCredie, author of New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa

Athol McCredie is Curator Photography at Te Papa, where he has worked since 2001. He has been involved with photography as a researcher, curator and photographer since the 1970s. His publications include Brian Brake: Lens on the world (editor, 2010), New Zealand Photography Collected (2015) and The New Photography: New Zealand’s first generation of documentary photographers (2019), and most recently Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer (2024), shortlisted for New Zealand’s national book awards.

“I looked for photographs that were evocative, resonant, ambiguous, entertaining, and most especially, that might say something about the nature of photography itself.”
—Athol McCredie

Q1. In the ten years since the first edition of New Zealand Photography Collected much has changed in the photography collections of Te Papa. Can you describe what you think the most interesting of those developments have been?

I think the biggest change is that I can now see so much more of the collection. There has been a 50% increase in digital scans of collection photographs since I made the selection for the first edition in 2014. That’s about 60,000 new images to select from. About two thirds are images of existing collection photographs, with the rest representing new acquisitions. This was really significant for the book because I selected from digital images on my computer. It is impractical to view tens of thousands of physical photographs, especially since the bulk of our collection consists of negatives, which are almost impossible to read until you see a positive version.

Q2. With almost 400,000 images to draw upon, what was your process for deciding what to include?

We tend to think of photographs as simple depictions: an image of x or y. But many photographs are so much more than literal depiction. I looked for photographs that were evocative, resonant, ambiguous, entertaining, and most especially, that might say something about the nature of photography itself.

As for process, it was a long and arduous matter of identifying possibilities, separating them into the chapter groups, and refining and refining; whittling down hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands, then to thousands, and finally to hundreds, bit by bit. When it got to the lower numbers it was a more intense process of figuring out what worked on page spreads next to other photographs, as well as ensuring variety, storytelling and rhythm within each chapter.

Q3. What do you consider to be the most significant change in the 175-year history and evolution of photography and why?

A big trend has been towards a greater ease of taking photographs and a consequent democratisation of the medium. In the nineteenth century, most photographs were taken by professionals, as the process was difficult and expensive. But the invention of roll film in the 1890s created the amateur snapshooter. And in recent times a second technological innovation – the smart phone – means that nearly everybody has a camera with them at all times. Both these changes saw an explosion in the number of photographs taken. Hand-in-hand, some might say, was a decline in aesthetic quality, as photographs became more casually taken and less considered.

Q4. Of course, the latest impact is AI, what does that mean for the future of photography?

It certainly seems that there will be a reduced need to actually take photographs if we can create (often better) images with a computer. This is already happening in fashion, where you can generate perfect models without extensively retouching (and paying) living humans.

But if it seems that AI imagery is going to create a virtual world it is worth remembering that the invention of photography ushered this in from the outset. A nineteenth century viewer could sit in a parlour and browse an album of photographs of some far-off location as an armchair traveller. Or view members of the family who were not present. These were virtual experiences which had never existed before.

Q5. How does New Zealand Photography Collected relate to the other publications you’ve produced during your time Te Papa?

After I produced the Brian Brake book in 2010, I decided that a way forward to understand, explore and raise awareness of Te Papa’s photography collection would be to produce an overview publication and then following this with ones that burrowed down into specific areas. So that is how New Zealand Photography Collected, in its first edition of 2015, came about – as the overview. I then produced The New Photography in 2019, on the beginnings of contemporary photography in this country, and Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer in 2024 on a significant figure within our collection. I should have moved faster with the deeps dives though, because an issue I hadn’t envisaged was that a 2015 overview would cease to accurately reflect the collection (or our understanding of it) fairly quickly. So this book resets that starting point.

Q6. From glass plate negatives to Polaroids, there are a wide range of techniques and formats to reproduce in print as accurately as possible. How do you go about achieving this?

A black and white print is one thing to reproduce on the page, though the reproduction in printer’s ink will never be as rich as the original, with its gelatin silver or inkjet pigment composition. But consider the daguerreotype, a highly reflective image on a mirror-like metal plate that must be shifted and rotated to catch glimpses of an image. Our copying technology allows us to capture the image very clearly, yet this is nothing like the imperfect way we see it in real life. So do you reproduce the clear image or a largely illegible but more realistic view of the photograph? In between these media are negatives, which in the pre-digital age were used by photographers to make positive prints. There are endless ways to interpret a negative. We try to make a reproduction from these negatives that brings out maximum information in an aesthetically pleasing way. But this will rarely look the same as a print made from the negative in its own time. So the question is, which is better? The rich, clear, well detailed image of any size we wish that we can digitally make today, or the possibly murky, unsharp, and probably tiny print that the photographer themselves would have produced? There are scholarly, ethical, aesthetic and technical issues all combined here.

Q7: Indeed, preserving and sharing these taonga is a collective endeavour – what does that look like at Te Papa?

Standing behind each photograph in the book are a large number of people who have enabled it to get there. The process begins with acquiring the photograph. Curators don’t just go off to dealer galleries and say ‘I’ll have this, this and that’; or gladly take everything that people bring to the door as donations. The reality is a complex acquisition process with many checks and balances that is managed by the Loans and Acquisitions team and involves numerous staff assessing and approving each work that is proposed for the collection. Once work enters the collection it needs to be given a unique number and documented location so we can track it, and then described fully on our database, including its measurements, maker, medium, provenance, locality and insurance value. It will be treated by conservators if it is damaged or unstable, matted or placed in archival storage enclosures, reproduction rights and sought where needed, and imaged. All the information we record about it is entered on our collections database. This is constantly being updated as new information comes to light through research or information from the public and as items live their lives in a public collection in the form of further conservation treatments, movements about the building, exhibitions, loans, publications, and online resources. The database means that staff can access items in virtual form to manage and use them. And by porting aspects of this to our Collections Online website, the public likewise gain access to our collections.

Q8. Photography is more accessible than ever – as a curator is this a blessing or a curse?

It is something of a curse because photographs are now so easy to produce that their volume has become astronomical. Collecting institutions struggle to deal with the quantity of images taken by an earlier generation of photographers using 35mm film, where you typically have 36 exposures on a roll of film and dozens of rolls, but only one or two good ones per roll. Now, with cellphones, this situation is multiplied several times over, and I don’t know how it will be possible to collect photography taken on these devices unless it is only from users who have ruthlessly edited their images.

Q9. Are there any new images in the book that you’re particularly excited for a wider audience to become more familiar with?

I love the photograph of Piha Beach and Lion Rock taken around 1947 by Vivienne Lee-Johnston. As I wondered what to write about it I decided to do an online search for other photographs of this very popular subject. There are certainly hundreds on the internet, yet despite being in colour and taken with cameras vastly more sophisticated than the one Lee-Johnson had, they are all so much more boring than hers. Some people have tried hard with digital effects, but they lack the charm and sensitivity of this black and white photograph taken three quarters of a century ago.

Another is the frontispiece image of the Bede photography studio. I loved it as soon as I saw it and am so glad I can now share it. It is such an over-the-top image of a photography studio, with four photographers simultaneously shooting a whole variety subjects in the same space. Completely improbable, but then it was meant as advertising, not as a documentation of reality.

Spread from New Zealand Photography Collected:

Vivienne Lee-Johnson
Piha, c.1947
Roll film negative, 60 × 90 mm
Purchased 1997 with New Zealand
Lottery Grants Board funds, A.013875

Q10. You say that it is tempting to present the 344 feature photographs in the book without any words at all. With that in mind, what do you hope that readers take away from this new book?

I have tried to find shape in the collection and set out in the book why it has this shape. So I hope readers gain a better understanding of how collections come to be and why certain types of photographs are collected. And to understand that a collection of photography can never be a history of photography due to the various biases of collecting. But at an individual image level, I hope they find plenty of images that raise questions: ones to wonder about and reflect upon. I picture the book as a container that from the outside has a defined shape and meaning but which, when you open it, has images that burst from the pages in their diversity, unruliness and provocations.