From the 1860s, a generation of fledgling tourists beat across the sea in search of the exotic. To New Zealand they came, about 30 a day in the summer of 1885/86, descending on “the heart of Wonderland” – Otukapuarangi and Te Tarata, the Pink and White Terraces, the eighth wonder of the world.
Some painted the legendary fanned staircases. Some made engravings. Some tried to describe the unearthly landscape in words. The Duke of Edinburgh scratched his name into the silica surface in a popular act of vandalism. Others took photographs.
Of the many visitors to the Rotomahana region before Tarawera, Ruawahia and Wahanga disgorged their molten contents onto the villages of Te Wairoa, Te Ariki and Moura, George D Valentine, gentleman photographer from Dundee, completed one of the most extensive and extraordinary photographic records of the area. Of the 70 images of the Rotomohana area taken by Valentine, about 60 have passed through the hands of photographer Ken Hall.
“A friend had bought an album of his work from a deceased estate,” says Hall, now working in the Christchurch Art Gallery’s historical art department. “I was totally captivated, mainly because of the photographs of the Terraces. I’d never heard of him, but I wanted to know more. It became a passion, an obsession.”
This obsession has resulted in a touring exhibition of Valentine’s photographs, a collection of new negatives and a book written by Hall.
The book begins with the story of Scotsman James Valentine – engraver, pioneer photographer and social reformer, whose small studio in Dundee and portable darkroom atop a four-wheel carriage became the hub of a prolific photography enterprise. But consumption put his son George in search of a kinder climate. In 1884, he, his wife and two children rented a house in Mary Ann St, Nelson. From there, in the company of Auckland publisher Charles Chapman, he went to the Pink and White Terraces, a wispy, wide-eyed man carrying a tripod, a large camera – probably a Meagher, says Hall – and a box of dry-plate-glass negatives.
“A lot of photographs of the Terraces feel like the camera has just been pointed at them, but his are very well-composed. There’s a structure, a unity unusual for the period,” says Hall. “Valentine was a gentleman photographer who loved his craft. He was not a commercial photographer. He was interested in aesthetics, and there’s a sense of wonder in these works.”
In “Mounts Tarawera and Ruawahia from Te Ariki, 1886”, a man stands in his whale boat on Lake Tarawera. The image is clear and detailed, the sheets of water and sky flawless, the poised moment evocative but unemotional. You can almost touch the exposed veins in the cliff face. You can feel the silence of the land.
“He was the most aesthetic 19th-century photographer,” says Mark Strange, senior conservator of photographs at the Alexander Turnbull Library. “His composition is rarely traditional – it’s adventurous, striking and often asymmetrical, whereas most photographers used symmetry as a guide, a shortcut to a balanced image. He chose unconventional viewing angles. Many photographers were making a trade out of the topographical image, but he was in a different league.”
From his rented darkroom in Nelson, Valentine worked on his contact prints of the Terraces, capturing the monolithic strength of the formations, the fine honeycomb detail of the silica in images that would later appear in books and personal travel albums. Within a year, he returned to a different landscape.
The New Zealand Herald, June 10, 1886: “It is reported that all Rotomahana has disappeared.” Tarawera, Wahanga and Ruawahia had erupted. The land had split open, villages lay buried under layers of mud, over a hundred people were dead. Valentine’s post-eruption photographs show a dark fissure ripping the landscape from Rotomahana to Ruawahia in a strange, post-apocalyptic stillness.
Despite an incessant tubercular cough, Valentine continued to work. He photographed the Waitakere bush, the Waitomo Caves, scenes from a brief trip around the South Pacific. Devoid of heroic bureaucrats and stereotypical smiling maidens, these images show a mastery of the camera, an extraordinarily executed arrangement of landscape.
After six years of photographing silica terraces, thermal geysers, caves and post-eruption landscapes, the “celebrated Mr Valentine” died on February 26, 1890. Although his family returned to Scotland and the Valentine name went on to dominate the scenic postcard market until the 1970s, the legacy of George D Valentine foundered in museum archives and personal collections. Until, that is, an album was found.
GEORGE D VALENTINE: A 19th Century Photographer in New Zealand, by Ken Hall (Craig Potton, $49.95); exhibition at Christchurch Art Gallery, till June 27.