Artwork information

The subject represented is Ngāti Kahungunu ki Wairarapa rangatira Ngātuere Tāwhirimātea Tāwhao. At his death in 1890 Ngātuere was said to have been 117 years old. As Angela Ballara writes in his entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: ‘It is certain that his life spanned the whole period of Pākehā colonisation, and that he had to deal with its effects in Wairarapa when already an elderly man. He showed a marked capacity to change in the face of the new. He was a strong character and asserted his traditional authority against both younger men and Pākehā newcomers.’ Ballara concludes ‘to his own people he was the embodiment of mana and tapu.’

This photographic print foregrounds a practice that was common in mid-to-late nineteenth-century New Zealand: the sale and reprinting of photographic negatives sometimes years after the images were first taken. When photographers sold their business or left an area they would frequently on-sell their negatives to another practitioner. Ngātuere sat for photographer Thomas Price, who was based in Masterton from 1879 to 1897. Price sold his business to John Minnis in late 1896, who in turn on-sold the negatives to Price’s former studio assistant Denman Wilton who likely printed this photograph.

This practice complicates the authorship and dating of the photograph, especially as the printing photographer appears to have added to the image. Ngātuere’s moko has been enhanced on the negative, which results in the appearance of double tattoo lines in several places on his forehead and cheeks. The lines on his chin also appear to have been scratched onto the negative and there are other amendments visible to his hair, beard and the background. The photograph itself has been cropped – it was originally chest length – and significantly enlarged from the original print which measured only 144 x 101 mm.