https://dx.doi.org/10.32912/bulletin/21/11
Abstract
In 1917, the director of the Dominion Museum in Wellington, New Zealand sent his first form letter to the next-of-kin of New Zealanders awarded medals during the Great War. The director wrote to families, asking them for photographs of their decorated kin, and any other artefacts, ‘in readiness for the time when they can be fittingly displayed’. The outcome of this effort was 71 photographic display boards, now held at Archives New Zealand along with the correspondence associated with the acquisition, reproduction, and display of the photographs. The heroic, commemorative narrative represented by the images featured on these boards was just one of many ways in which photographic technology operated during and immediately after the war. However, as Sandy Callister notes in her 2008 book, The Face of War: New Zealand’s Great War Photography: ‘…[t]oo often, the multiplicity of ways in which New Zealanders produced and consumed photographs during the war years is overlooked’.
With this in mind, the article considers the nature of war photography, museums, and public remembrance, through the close examination of the correspondence related to the Great War medal recipients’ photographic display boards. By doing so, the article amplifies the work of Callister, in addition to Tanja Luckins and Anne-Marie Condé’s research, which has examined the motivations behind the donation and sale of Great War soldiers’ diaries and letters to the Australian War Memorial in Canberra and Mitchell Library in Sydney. As this case study demonstrates, we see that photographic prints, because of their capacity to be copied, existed simultaneously both in private and in public, and conveyed different but also overlapping meanings in each of these two spheres.
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Citation
Ross, Kirstie. 2020. 'Fittingly displayed': the acquisition and the exhibition of photographs of New Zealand's Great War medal recipients at the Dominion Museum. Bulletin of the Auckland Museum. 21: 71–80. https://dx.doi.org/10.32912/bulletin/21/11