Early photographs for auction

Press, 9 October 1982, Page 5

Early photographs for auction

Photographs of early Christchurch scenes and prominent figures will be included in an auction of New Zealand photographs and books - in Christchurch. The photographs, which date from about 1860. will be auctioned by R. G. Bell and Company at its Gloucester St premises on October 13. Thirty are from an English collection only recently discovered and returned to New Zealand. The identity of the photographer. whose work includes views of Lyttelton, the Priovincial Government Buildings in Armagh Street.

the Hereford Street bridge. Sumner. Shag Rock, and Christchurch flourmills, is uncertain. Several of the photographs include the "Photographic Rooms" of Mr J. Elsbee al the corner of Hereford Street and Oxford Terrace West and it is thought that Mr Elsbee may have taken them. Only one photograph is signed, a picture from the collection of Dr Alfred Barker. Dr Barker, a keen amateur photographer, arrived at Lyttelton in the Charlotte Jane in 1850. Other photographs are of

the First Bishop of Christchurch, the leader of the Canterbury Association. Leithfield. the West Coast and an unidentified surveyor's camp. The books for sale are about New Zealand and the history of Canterbury. “There are several first editions among them." said Mr R. G. Bell. They include a volume of letters from Edward Gibbon Wakefield to John Robert Godley and others responsible for the settlement of Canterbury, and a copy of the “Cyclopedia of New Zealand. Canterbury." 1903.