Local photographers leave legacies for the city
We look at photographs every day here in Special Collections. They range from formally set portraits to scenic images to carefully composed photographic recordings of our built environment. Just as often they are family snapshots. Professional photographers especially though, tend to leave a body of work, each of which can speak thousands of words. Their legacies are to the people at large but very much to historians and people with an enthusiastic interest in history.
In Hamilton, despite the slow development in its first seven decades, we are very fortunate that the photographers have left so much to the city in visual history. Louden, Cartwright, Gaze, Neiderer, Graham and Lindberg are names that spring readily to mind.
We look at hundreds of photographs but rarely at the photographer. It’s almost as if we see him or her as incidental. They are not. It is in their skilled hands to make the very best of the subject and most professionals do this with insightful observation.
The gentleman in the photograph is Henry Edward Gaze. He was born in 1874, only seventeen years since the collodion photographic plates were invented. By 1910 the predominant professional medium was still the glass plate negative. Gaze grew up in this era. Henry Gaze ran a studio in Hamilton for about forty years. He was well known here but additionally - and perhaps not well known locally - he enjoyed an international reputation for excellence in art photography.
The wit in this portrait taken in 1947 (reluctantly allowed by Gaze), by Stefano Francis Paulovich Webb of Christchurch, is the hat set about forty degrees from the centre. Gaze is challenging Webb to ‘get it right’.
Henry Gaze died in Hamilton in 1953.
