Portraits of another world

Colourised historical images bring the past to life, highlighting small details and huge differences in New Zealand society.

- JOCK PHILLIPS

When first asked to write introductory essays and the captions for Our Land in Colour, Brendan GraW ham's history of Aotearoa New Zealand through his colourised photographs, I was not enthusiastic. There were already several excellent books by Keith Sinclair and Dick Scott telling the history of the country and its peoples through old images, and I had doubts about whether we could add anything. But the moment I began looking at Brendan's work I was hooked. I knew many of the photographs already in black and white form, but to see them in colour was a revolution in consciousness. It brought exciting new perspectives and a new experience of the past.

For a start, colourised photographs bring a shock of reality. We are used to looking at the past through a black and white lens. It is as if the New Zealand of the 19th and early 20th centuries was a foreign country, made slightly unreal because colour didn't exist. Then we look at those decades in colour and they come alive in an indescribable way.

You pick up a black and white photo of sailing ships in Hokianga Harbour in 1908 and the ships look quaint and "historical". Then you look at the image in colour. Your eyes pick out in the foreground white smoke floating against the green of pine trees and coloured washing on a clothes line and you realise this is how people actually lived and how they travelled at sea. Or you turn the page and see a two-page spread on the Wellington wharves about the same time and immediately the walking city comes to life. You recognise the scene, it is Queens Wharf, but that's not what gives the sense of lived reality; it is the subtle colours, the blue uniforms of two message boys, the green of the luggage store, the smart white dress and hat of a woman with her parasol and the brown and white of the two horses pulling a cart. Your imagination has so much more to work with.