ABSTRACT
Before she married, White subsidised her photography with nursing. The mental Asylum in Auckland where she worked exposed her to the dark side of New Zealand’s colonial society while also providing her with fertile photographic subjects for her rich sense of irony. Ostensibly a documentary photographer, she deployed unusual camera angles and compositions to highlight the highly regimented and harsh nature of the mental institution in which she worked. She used these same techniques to equally critical effect when she later photographed the Māori soldiers sent to London for Queen Victoria’s jubilee celebrations and the extensive damage to the landscape caused by the massive gold mining rigs and processing plants being erected at Karangahake, the rural town she moved to after her marriage. The chapter argues that White’s photographs of Māori challenged the dominant portrayals of Māori produced by the tourist industry that positioned them as abject relics from the past, and it did so by providing examples of Māori agency, resilience and modernity. The chapter also addresses the subject of cultural cross-dressing by examining White’s photograph of herself wearing a handsome Māori cloak and sporting a moko (women’s chin tatoo).
