Put together by Te Papa photography curator Athol McCredie, it traverses the history of New Zealand from the 1850s right through to the present day, and it includes images from many family collections.
The cover shot reveals Aotearoa's untamed beauty in Milford Sound, cascade from Mitre, 1885, a gelatin glass plate shot by Alfred Burton, of the famed Burton Brothers photographers. The clarity of the long-exposure detail is remarkable, the photo evocative of an age full of promise.
The book, which contains just over 400 images, offers just a tiny glimpse of Te Papa's collection of a staggering total of 320,000 photos.
The first chapter, How We Looked, introduces us to the daguerrotype, the French technique that transferred images on to a silver-plated sheet of copper. The ancient family portraits have a heavy format, typically portraying the stiff body language in the formal shots of the early colonial immigrants; studies of a Woman wearing a bonnet, c. 1860 or Couple, 1850s, both by unknown photographers, invite close study for their unnatural demeanour alone.
In contrast, the American Photographic Company's 1869-76 study of "Maori sitter" Mrs Stewart is much more relaxed. The Auckland studio claimed to have the largest collection of "Maori celebrity" photos, a boast McCredie refutes.
Some early photographers specialised in portraits of Maori chiefs but not always with the kindest motives. Englishman John Henry Eaton, for example, presented 51 chiefly images on "cartes", each one with a handwritten summation of their merits, or otherwise. In the 1860s, he assessed Coromandel leader Taraia Ngakuti Te Tumuhuia as "a great Scoundrel ... he gives the Government endless trouble and annoyance".
As we move into the 1920s, New Zealanders seem to be loosening up - a bit. Photos of people lolling about at the beach or on picnics are emerging, with a splendid group shot of the cheerful Mrs D. Ying family, 1950, from the Spencer Digby Studio, indicating a country in the process of slowly becoming more diverse.
Being There: Places and Events takes us from Charles Spencer's famous 1880 studies of the Pink and White Terraces to the Burton Brothers' views of a dusty, empty road in 1887 - it's now a place called Whanganui - and an array of primitive, muddy settlements like Petone, Dunedin and Queenstown. We move into colour in 1905, with chromolithographs of Milford Sound and Mitre Peak commissioned by the Department of Tourist and Health Resorts, but return to black and white in Napier, 1931, with a wide shot of the smoking, collapsed town in the aftermath of the earthquake which killed 256 people.
Whites Aviation gives us hand-coloured views of a barely developed Queenstown in the 1950s - those were the days - and Brian Brake moves into the 60s with colour shots of Mitre Peak, the Canterbury Plains and holidaymakers at Tauranga commissioned by Air NZ and the Government Tourist Bureau.
The dry titles of the remaining chapters - Belonging and Aspiring, Pursuing Knowledge, Conceiving a Photographic Art, Other Perspectives: Social Documentary and About Photography: Contemporary Work - barely do justice to the richness of the periods of history represented on the pages. There's a sense of a small country busily trying to get bigger, developing its roads and rails, its industries, its housing and education - and its sense of style, with hilarious advertising photos for Jantzen swimwear (1932-33) and Sincerity Suits (1930s).
The notion that photography could have artistic qualities also started to burst forth, with arts and crafts architect J.W. Chapman-Taylor's whimsical Peter Pan on Mt Eden, 1928, predating intriguing works by Frank Hofman, Eric Lee-Johnson and Theo Schoon.
Social Documentary is when New Zealand photographers really started to break free, with documentary work by artists such as Marti Friedlander, Glenn Busch and Robin Morrison; strip club images taken by John Daley in K'Rd and Willis St; the transgenders captured so frankly by Fiona Clark; and the gang shots by Glenn Jowitt and Ans Westra. Jowitt was also given close access to Auckland's Pacific Island community. Pacific Island photographers like Edith Amituanai are also finding their own way into the picture, with her "deadpan" studies of her extended family and PI rugby players playing in France.
The chapter's closing works by Laurence Aberhart, Anne Noble and Andrew Ross speak of a confident independence becoming more evident in our photographers and in ourselves as a nation, a maturity and diversity clearly represented in Contemporary Work, in which images by Peter Peryer, Patrick Reynolds, Gavin Hipkins, Fiona Pardington and Mark Adams have become so familiar in today's cultural language. The book closes with the inventive, clever Yvonne Todd's Susan Blunton, 2002, and Chlora, 2001, with no captions at all. The images are all you need to tell the story.
Recommended
The Scene Of The Crime
by Steve Braunias (HarperCollins $36.99)
Braunias brings a sparkling vitality to these "twelve extra-ordinary true stories of crime and punishment". His eye for the tiny details elevates his writing to the highest level; add in his humour, empathy and a healthy dose of cynicism and you've got a powerful portrait of "the dirty realism of New Zealand as it goes about its business ... it's not the dark underbelly; it's the dark surface, in plain sight". It's a pretty awful picture, really. Some of the names you will know: Mark Lundy, Antonie Dixon, Rolf Harris (Braunias was studying in Britain at the time of his trial), Clint Rickards. Others you won't, until now. And you may simply laugh at his reportage of a crime wave in Timaru: "A naked male riding his bike."
The Road To Little Dribbling
by Bill Bryson (Doubleday $50)
Bill Bryson celebrates the 20th anniversary of his best-selling Notes From A Small Island with a new journey around Britain, lamenting changes to the land he loves so much. Taking the "Bryson Line" from Bognor Regis in the south to Cape Wrath in the far north, it's a loose brief. Bryson wanders hither and thither, taking the opportunity to rant away on things like the English idea of "service", which ranges from indifferent to hostile; the surge of littering; preposterous urban developments and peppery observations on the rise of rudeness here, there and everywhere. There's still much to admire though: he salutes the fact that Britons are still the only people in the world genuinely happy to be presented with a cup of tea "and a small plain biscuit".
The White Road
by Edmund de Waal (Chatto & Windus $40)
Subtitled "A pilgrimage of sorts", this is written by an obsessive about an obsession - porcelain. Edmund de Waal, one of Britain's finest ceramicists whose Hare With Amber Eyes won a Royal Society of Literature award in 2011, investigates the history of porcelain, first made in China 1000 years ago. For 500 years no one in Europe knew how it was made; the Germans cracked it in 1708 but the process remained secret for many years, the product a mysterious luminous luxury craved by emperors, kings, collectors, the very rich - and the Nazis. Dachau had its own porcelain works where inmates produced kitsch figurines of nude Aryan youths. It's a frenetic, compulsive, often awful narrative which draws you in, much like the "porcelain sickness" that afflicted Augustus II the Strong of Saxony. He owned nearly 36,000 pieces.
To see our top reads of the year - from biographies, thrillers, popular fiction and animals, to young adult fiction and kids' picture books - grab a copy of today's Canvas Magazine.
