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Identifying Belwood: Searching for Sitters

Did you ever wonder what might have happened to the family photos you were made to pose for when you were a child? Did you ever suspect they could wind up in a museum?

 

The upcoming Tāmaki Herenga Waka: Stories of Auckland exhibition will include several images produced by Belwood Studios, a well-known Auckland photography studio from the mid-20th century. The Belwood negative collection, some 6500 images, was donated to the Museum and we want to find out as much as we can about the photographs.

 

We hold legal title to the physical negatives, but we are not the holders of the copyright – and we don’t know who is! Which is why we need your help, to discover the stories behind these wonderful works that capture a snapshot of Auckland’s history. Can you help us identify the people in these photographs?

Sometimes Auckland Museum receives amazing collections of photos that people may have discovered in their homes, at their workplaces, or tucked away in a box. Many of these images are from decades ago and they can reveal rich personal histories and what life was like many years ago. When planning an exhibition, we need to commit significant resources to making sure we have copyright and rights clearances. 

Copyright ‘gives the person who creates an original work exclusive rights to copy, publish, publicly perform, transmit and adapt their material’. There is a common misconception that ownership of a physical collection item means the Museum can use it how we want. However, the legal rights to use a large percentage of our collections are held externally. We must seek permission from artists, photographers, and creators to photograph and use collection items, even for non-commercial purposes like putting images on our website – even imaging a negative in our collection and printing it for exhibition can infringe copyright.

Items – like the Belwood Studios photographs – with unknown or untraced rights holders are called ‘orphaned works’. Interestingly, the Belwood negatives have an ambiguous copyright, because of the nature of the photography studio. The copyright of such images is typically held by the clients who commission them. But without business records, we must also consider the possibility that Belwood Studios may have signed contracts with the clients that granted ownership to the studio.

These images were taken in Auckland; we know that some of the subjects will likely still be alive and living here. We must also consider the ethics behind using and displaying photographs that were probably intended to be private records. The collection includes weddings, christenings, graduations, family photographs, and portraits. The subjects of photographs are protected under the Copyright Act if the images were intended for private purposes. We want to reconnect these people with their images and to create relationships with those subjects. Not only because they likely have rights over the images, but also because putting names to these images adds richness to our collections. The current call out is part of the Museum’s due diligence – to try to do our utmost to find the copyright holders and gain permission before we put them on display.

 

Belwood Studio was run by principal photographer Amy Harper from the mid-1920s to the late 1970s. Amy and her sister Dickie Steer went on to own several studios across the city which spoke to Amy’s success as one of the great pioneer business women of Aotearoa. The negative collection is hugely diverse, showcasing people from all walks of life, communities, cultures, and suburbs. Amy had a keen eye for detail in composing the perfect shot; her placement of groups ‘stimulated a conversation in an uncontrived manner’, and her arrangement of hands revealed ‘the wedding ring in a natural manner'.[1] On Saturdays, she said in a 1987 interview, ‘we used to have a line all along Karangahape Road of wedding cars’.[2] The sisters employed mostly female staff and taught them a diverse array of photographic skills.[3] ‘I remember one time, a captain of a boat or something, a man with a lot of regalia … got in front of the camera, sitting down, very stiff,’ Amy recalled. ‘He said to me, “When’s the photographer coming in?” I said, “I am the photographer.” He sat like a piece of wood.’[4]

 

 

[1] Maitland, Gordon. “Amy Harper & Her Studios.” Art New Zealand 68, Spring (1993), p. 101.

[2] Myers, Gill. “Amy Harper and Dickie Steer – Photographers.” Unpublished essay, University of Auckland, 1987, p. 38.

[3] McClure, Margaret. “Harper, Amy Merania.” Dictionary of New Zealand Biography, first published in 2000. Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand. https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/5h8/harper-amy-merania (accessed 18 February 2020).

[4] Myers, Gill. ibid, p. 33.

In 1969, when Amy and Dickie retired from the business, they sold their remaining studio to Doug Scott, a former employee, who renamed it Photovision Limited. In 1979, Photovision donated the Belwood Studios collection to the Auckland Museum. It went untouched for three decades, until a dedicated team catalogued each negative and digitised a selection (which you can browse on the Auckland Museum website here). Tāmaki Herenga Waka will display some of these images long-term for the very first time, from August 2020, which might have surprised Amy. ‘I never dreamed [the photographs] would be any good at all,’ she said, before her death in 1998. ‘In fact, I don’t know what good they’d be up there [at the Museum] even now.’[1] But her photos will help Tāmaki Herenga Waka do the work of sharing diverse stories of the people and places of Tāmaki Makaurau, encouraging you and your whānau to explore your Tāmaki.

 

[1] Myers, Gill. “Amy Harper and Dickie Steer – Photographers.” Unpublished essay, University of Auckland, 1987, page 31.

We would love to hear from you if you think you know who any of the people in these pictures are!

Please contact Shaun Higgins, Auckland Museum’s Pictorial Curator on [email protected].

Blog Searching for Sitters by Katie Skinner, Interpretive Planning Coordinator and Zoe Richardson, Image Orders and Permissions Manager. Published March 2020.