Photographs of William Harding featured in major exhibition at Whanganui Regional Museum

Between skin & shirt exhibition at Whanganui Regional Museum.

For the first time, the photographs of William Harding (1826-1899) are featured in a major exhibition titled Between skin & shirt: The photographic portraits of William Harding.

The exhibition is currently on show at the Whanganui Regional Museum.

The collection of Harding’s glass-plate negatives, over 6500 in total, held at the Alexander Turnbull Library, is undoubtedly of national importance. His portraits provide a detailed picture of Whanganui society from the 1850s to the 1880s and are a rich source of information relating to Māori and Pākehā individuals and their relationships at a formative time in this country’s history.

But what really makes the photographs special is not their broader significance, nor their number, but the minutiae of detail evident in each one of them. Every image depicts its subjects with such depth and nuance that we find ourselves looking, it seems, at people, we might know.

Baby with ‘hidden mother’, around 1870. The mother was needed to balance the baby, but Harding would crop her out of the prints from the negatives. Alexander Turnbull Library Collection ref: 1/4-007765-G

The faces are immediate and relatable, despite having been photographed over 140 years ago. How did Harding achieve this striking effect? Firstly, the glass plates he used produce a sharper, more stable, and more detailed negative than paper. In addition, Harding’s work was what his daughter Lydia described as unerringly ‘faithful’. That is to say, he was interested most of all in authenticity.

Unlike other commercial photographers, Harding embellished his studio with only a small repertoire of props and backdrops and wouldn’t retouch his photographs to flatter his sitters. But in the shabby setting of his studio, his subjects are luminous. The women, men, children, families, and other groups who sat for him are shown with sensitivity and honesty. We are drawn to the contemporaneity of their faces and in this way, we make a connection with the person.

Harding’s studio was in Ridgeway St from 1860 until 1889 when he left Whanganui. His collection of glass-plate negatives was nearly dumped by the studio’s new owner but rescued by a relative of Harding’s and the museum. They were bought by the Turnbull Library in 1948.

Harding’s methods were somewhat unconventional because he refused to compromise his art to make money. He’d come to New Zealand from England as a coachbuilder in 1855, with his wife Annie. He tried his hand at cabinetmaking but in 1860 set up his own photographic studio in Whanganui.

He was clever at whatever he turned his hand to – an autodidact with a prodigious memory, he could quote the Bible at will, build telescopes, and make his own cameras. His lack of financial motivation meant, however, that the family relied on Annie’s earnings as a teacher to get by. Unlike the landscapes he much preferred to photograph, portraits at least provided some regular income, and we can be thankful they did, or he would not have produced so many.

This exhibition of Harding’s portraits, reproduced at a large scale from the original negatives, gives us a chance to get close to a diverse cast of characters. Sometimes it seems that those characters are watching us. In the mutual exchange, time and space appear to dissolve. As photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson has said, “The most difficult thing … is a portrait. You have to try and put your camera between the skin of a person and his shirt.” Harding achieves just that.

■ Dr Fiona Oliver curated Between skin & shirt: The photographic portraits of William Harding. Dr Oliver is an exhibitions adviser at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.