Old Auckland observed

Press, 8 April 1978, Page 15

Old Auckland observed

Auckland Through a Victorian Lens. By William Main. Millwood Press. 177 pp. $14.95.

(Reviewed by John Wilson)

This volume should leave most who peruse it with a remarkable series erf images of how Auckland was and how Aucklanders were. There are Edwardian Aucklanders clustered round a fountain in Albert Park; Aucklanders of another year watching a game of cricket from their carriages; from an earlier time still there is a dramatic view of a regimental camp at Otahuhu during the Maori Wars; there is the empty interior of a Victorian barber shop; there are countless raw, strong faces; there are buildings some now vanished, others now mellow looking gauntly new. Another reader might make an entirely different list of individual photographs from the book which made a particular impression, or select other qualities to remember of the portraits or architectural studies. But it is a measure of the book’s quality that the impressions left by individual

photographs should be strong and the qualities of the collection as » whole should be memorable to a wide range of readers. The time which the compiler spent on selecting the photographs from the very many more offering was well spent. The photographs, which span, more than half a century, are various: portraits, views and pictures of "current events” all being represented. This variety gives the book much of its strength; it may also give rise to some dissatisfaction, for the book’s focus, in both the pictures and in the notes on each photograph, shifts in a disconcerting manner. The book deals variously with the history of photography, the history of photography in Auckland, the lives of individual photographers of importance, and the history of Auckland itself. But the book is still satisfyingly coherent. All that is required is an acceptance of “photohistory” as a discipline or way of studying the past which has its own rules, and that books like this are not to be judged by the rules of “conventional” history or biography.