Pictures which make history

Press, 4 November 1978, Page 17

Pictures which make history

Looking Back: A Photographic History of New Zealand. By Keith Sinclair and Wendy Harrex. Oxford. 240 pp. $16.50. (Reviewed by John Wilson) “Looking Back” is a happy blend of the scholarly and the popular. Too often. liberally illustrated books sacrifice accuracy and fullness to the requirements of visual appeal. “Looking Back” has visual appeal, flowing from the individual photographs and the book’s generally high standard of design; it is also intellectually stimulating and satisfying. The book is organised by themes rather than chronologically. That the text takes this form of a series of essays points up the limitations of “photographic” history. The pictures have a more vivid, immediate impact than any text could have; but a complete, purely pictorial narrative of New Zealand’s history is impossible.

Some things about the past simply cannot be discovered from pictures. And those pictures which we have were taken, it has to be remembered, as often as not for a pleasing visual effect as to provide a thoroughly authentic and accurate record. However appealing “photographic histories’’ are, their main purpose must always be to illuminate what the written records have already told us. It is no accident that the recent spate of books of

historical photographs on the New Zealand market has come after long years of assiduous academic research. The thousands of words already written are what give these pictures their worth. Keith Sinclair’s text could have only been written in the way it has, as a series of essays, after enormous groundwork had been done. The themes explored in these essays are largely familiar — race relations, the breaking in of the land, the growth of urban life, the “submerged” class history of New Zealand, domestic politics and international affairs. Only the first essay — emphasising that New Zealand society is not quite so “British” as is often believed by discussing the mixture of different races and nationalities — suggests an interesting new approach to New Zealand history. But Professor Sinclair can hardly be faulted for not introducingnew insights when many of the insights which the book does present were his in the fir§t place. Some of the essays are opinionated, some might say biased, in their interpretations, but the elegance of their presentation goes some way towards mitigating this fault. The volume is replete with vivid pictorial images, Many of the photographs provide an aesthetic pleasure as well as illustrating the book’s historical themes. Pictorial value has, properly, not always been paramount in the selection of the

photographs, but most of the nineteenth century photographs in particular have pictorial as well as historical worth. The book has one major, practical drawback. The essays ask to be read through, but their flow is constantly interrupted by detailed picture captions which have to be read in close conjunction with the text to link pictures and text. It is difficult to see how this problem could have been resolved except by the less satisfactory technique of presenting the essays, each one followed by an album of photographs. This would have defeated the purpose of letting the available photographs guide, within the limitations of any photographic record, the direction taken by the book. There is a difference between an illustrated history and a photographic history, and any alternative arrangement of text and photographs might have blurred the important distinction. It is regrettable that such a satisfactory book should have been diminished by association with a “Book of the Month” scheme which promises few advantages, and threatens real dangers, both to New Zealand publishing and to the New Zealand book-buying public. The book could have stood perfectly well on its own without such dubious additional promotion.