The past in a different light: how Māori embraced – and rejected – the colonial camera lens

 Angela Wanhalla

Professor of History, University of Otago

By the 1870s, photography was a ubiquitous presence in the colonial life of Aotearoa New Zealand. For Māori, however, it was also a colonising tool – part of the colonial practices of land alienation, war and propaganda that affected them so deeply.

This complex Māori engagement with photography features in A Different Light: First Photographs of Aotearoa, an exhibition that opens today in Auckland.

A collaboration between Tāmaki Paenga Hira–Auckland War Memorial Museum, the Alexander Turnbull Library and Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, the exhibition and associated book from Auckland University Press showcase the photographic riches of three nationally significant collecting institutions.

Starting with the arrival of photography in Aotearoa in the 1840s, the book and exhibition chart technological developments and cover a wide range of photographic genres, from studio portrait to amateur photography.

These photographic beginnings were deeply embedded in the making of the settler state. Its invention coincided precisely with the signing of Te Tiriti o Waitangi/Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which ushered in formal British colonisation.

And it was also in the region where Te Tiriti was signed that Captain Lucas of the French barque Justine is believed to have experimented with making daguerreotypes in 1840-41.

Because of these links, photography’s technological development and its different uses can’t be understood without reference to the political, cultural and economic contexts of colonisation.

The settler lens

Photographs are complicit in colonialism because they were used to document the impacts of migration, settlement and land transformation. For example, they illustrate the advance of settlement and the subjugation of Māori after the Waikato War (1863-64).

Imperial officers such as William Temple, who was active in military campaigns to advance European settlement, photographed two icons of colonisation: roads and military camps.   

An Irish-born soldier, Temple followed the Great South Road on foot and with his camera as the route advanced towards the border of Kiingitanga territory. One of his photographs (above) demonstrates the impacts of the Great South Road on the local environment.

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Photography’s commercial interests also aligned with colonial propaganda, especially as landscape photography grew in popularity from the 1870s. Historian Jarrod Hore has demonstrated how landscape photographers helped shape settler attitudes to the environment, but also documented colonial progress.

Photographs were used to illustrate engineering successes and the advancing tide of settlement. For instance, John McGregor’s 1875 photograph (below) depicts the clearing of Bell Hill in Dunedin. In the background, the church embodies the possibilities of colonial advancement enabled by environmental transformation.

Our early photographers were, in Hore’s words, engaged in “settler colonial work” because they “mobilised and visually reorganised local environments in the service of broader settler colonial imperatives”.

Visual sovereignty

In refusing to be photographed, Te Whiti was engaging in what Tuscarora scholar, artist and curator Joelene Rickard characterises as Indigenous visual sovereignty.

Rickard has used this concept to describe how Indigenous photographers today are making “assertions of spiritual and political sovereignty”. But she is also highlighting long traditions of Indigenous art-making as sources of empowerment and assertions of sovereignty.

Te Whiti’s refusal to be captured by the camera was an act of visual sovereignty because he recognised the qualities that made a photograph so exciting also made it dangerous: it was portable, collectable, and it was a business.

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Right now in Aotearoa New Zealand, when the political climate is hostile to Te Tiriti, te reo Māori and tino rangatiratanga, it is important to be reminded that Māori resistance and resurgence have long histories.

They appear in our photographic record in numerous forms – in Hākaraia Pāhewa’s record of the vitality, dynamism and energy of Māori life in the early 20th century, and in Te Whiti’s refusal to engage with photography, which undermined its power as a settler colonial technique.

Te Whiti’s rejection of the camera is suggestive for historians of photography, too. Rather than seeing Māori refusal to engage with photography as embodying a fear of a new technology, perhaps it was a denial of the settler colonialism the camera embodied – a claim to visual sovereignty and the ability to control one’s self-image.

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A Different Light – First Photographs of Aotearoa: Auckland War Memorial Museum, April–September; Adam Art Gallery, Wellington, December 2024–June 2025; Hocken Collections, Dunedin, August 2025–January 2026.

https://theconversation.com/the-past-in-a-different-light-how-maori-embraced-and-rejected-the-colonial-camera-lens-225785