Drawing from the vast archive of the 20th Century Northland bushman and photographer Tudor Collins, F4, Maree Sheehan and Shaun Higgins create an installation in two rooms at Pah Homestead. One room interacts with the other on the theme of Fissure, using photo-media and sound. Discovered recently in a private garage and extensively decayed, the work explores the eerily beautiful degradation of the photographic negatives of glass and silver. The process of the corruption of memory inescapably embraces the faded subjects of the plates, a process halted by comprehensive and indiscriminate digital archiving undertaken by the Auckland Museum.
Talking Culture:
2 - 3pm Sun 9th June at Pah Homestead – The Passing: conversation with curator Shaun Higgins (Auckland War Memorial Museum) and Marcus Williams (F4 Collective).
Drawing from the vast archive of the 20th Century Northland bushman and photographer Tudor Collins, join us for a special conversation with Shaun Higgins (Curator, Pictorial, Auckland War Memorial Museum).
Discovered recently in a private garage and extensively decayed, the Tudor Collins collection of glass plate negatives is not only of interest from a documentary perspective, but in so much as it shows a process of glass plate deterioration over time. Comprehensive digital archiving undertaken by the Auckland Museum attempts to arrest this process, but the decay that has already occurred over decades has created a visible transformation. Hear about the journey these glass plate negatives have been on since being rediscovered and peek into the past through these important images.
Shaun Higgins
Shaun is Curator, Pictorial at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. He looks after photography and artwork collections in a documentary heritage context focusing on research topics such as New Zealand photographic history, conflict photography, photographic technology and identification and attribution. His current research examines early New Zealand photography, especially the first decade where few extant examples are known. In spare time he likes to play with cameras both old and new
