The oldest surviving photograph of a Maori person has been discovered in the national library of Australia, a historical “scoop” being lauded on both sides of the Tasman Sea.
Hemi Pomara was kidnapped from his home on the Chatham Islands — a group of small islands about 800km east of New Zealand — in the early 1840s by British traders, after his family members were slaughtered by a rival Maori tribe.
Pomara was sent to school in Australia, before being transported to London and displayed as a “native” of the colonies before the royal family, at the British and Foreign Institution and at the Egyptian Hall, where he was a living display.
Previously, the first visual record of Pomara was a faded watercolor, but Australian National University (ANU) researchers have found a photograph of the young Maori man posing in his korowai, or cloak, in London in 1846.
Pomara’s story of survival has inspired generations of Maori writers and filmmakers, including Oscar-winning Taika Waititi, who plans to adapt Pomara’s tale for the big screen.
Writing in The Conversation, the ANU researchers said that the photograph was “almost certainly” made by Antoine Claudet, one of the most important figures in the history of early photography.
Before their discovery, the photograph was unattributed and only partially cataloged in the National Library of Australia.
Artist Martyn Jolly and art historian Elisa deCourcy, both of Australian National University, are convinced that the photograph is Claudet’s as “very few practitioners outside Claudet’s studio would have tinted daguerreotypes to this level of realism during photography’s first decade.”
“All the evidence now suggests the image is not only the oldest surviving photograph of Hemi, but also most probably the oldest surviving photographic portrait of any Maori person,” they said.
A portrait of Caroline and Sarah Barrett taken in about 1853 was previously thought to be the oldest image of a Maori person.
According to Jolly and DeCourcy, the daguerreotype of Pomara was purchased in the 1960s by the Australian photo historian Eric Keast Burke and found its way into the archives.
“Unusually for photographic portraits of this period, Hemi is shown standing full-length, allowing him to model all the features of his korowai,” the researchers wrote. “He poses amidst the accoutrements of a metropolitan portrait studio, but the horizontal line running across the middle of the portrait suggests the daguerreotype was taken against a paneled wall rather than a studio backdrop, possibly at the Royal Society meeting [in London].”
Pomara’s historical record goes cold after his return to New Zealand in 1947, although it is “possible” he returned to London as a husband and father, the researchers said.
“Much of Hemi’s story still evades official colonial records,” the researchers wrote. “As Taika Waititi’s film project suggests, the next layer of interpretation must be driven by indigenous voices.”
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