Artigo Revisado por pares

Composite portraiture in New Zealand

1981; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 5; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/03087298.1981.10442630

ISSN

2150-7295

Autores

Hardwicke Knight,

Tópico(s)

Photography and Visual Culture

Resumo

Abstract Composite portraiture has a long history which is not, of course, confined to this country, but it flourished here to a significant and, perhaps, astonishing degree during the 19th century. The purpose of the composites was usually commercial. Members of a congress might be so portrayed in collective fashion, or else a professional portrait photographer might take advantage of his accumulated files and issue a composite as his firm's advertisement. In this fashion the Burton Brothers of New Zealand made a fascinating composition between 1867 and 1877, which has already been published in another context1 , but is here reproduced for easy reference (Figure 1). The firm's shop-front is shown in the centre with the two photographers on either side. Above the shop-front are portraits of Captain Cook, Captain Cargill (the leader of the Otago settlement), Queen Victoria (the royal patron of the firm), and julius Vogel (the Premier of New Zealand in 1873), together with local administrators and other dignitaries. In the top corners are the bishops of the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches; below are the wives of the photographers. There are some 785 portraits in all. There is also, woven into the composite, the wording ‘hotography Burton Bros Dunedi’ which has been cut out and superimposed on the pasted-up portraits. Closer inspection reveals much humour. Under the words ‘Burton Bros’ are two photographs of seances or ghost pictures. In the ‘U’ of the word ‘unedi’ Alfred Burton himself appears, dressed up as Uncle Sam. A man who is thought to be Walter Burton appears in a nightshirt between the ‘I’ and ‘N’, and he is certainly the figure making strange gestures in two shots beyond the ‘N’. Between the ‘N’ and ‘E’ Alfred again appears, dignified in Masonic dress, while an adoring female worships him from the proximity of the adjacent ‘N’. A dog even turns up between the ‘H’ and ‘Y’ of the word ‘hotograph’. An interesting feature is the photographic caricature of a man with a large head on a small body, reminiscent of an 1876 example shown by Gaston Tissandier, who also gave some rather obvious instructions to enterprising montage artists: To represent a large head on a small body a picture of the head alone is first taken and then a picture of the entire body on a much smaller scale. Proofs are taken on paper from the two negatives, and then the large head is cut out and pasted on to the shoulders of the figure on the smaller scale. If the large head does not fit very well on to the small body the neck is touched up with a brush. A photograph is then taken of the picture thus obtained, and the negative produced will furnish any number of caricature proofs2. For sheer photographic fun, the Burton work is an outstanding example of its kind.

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