Heritage et AL

Image: Penny Vernon with her twin lens camera, 17 July 2025, photographer Jane Wild Robin Hyde’s distributed archive continues to grow. Sometimes the photograph, the book or the letter takes its own time. In this case a photograph which features Robin’s son Derek Challis took over forty years to be developed. The story behind the photograph demonstrates the way documentary heritage can surface beyond the formed collections. This is particularly apparent when an archive is collected after the subject’s death. Iris Guiver Wilkinson (1906 – 1939), known to her family as Iris, and now better known as Robin Hyde has left a trail of letters and photographs across the country and beyond reflecting her vivid and tumultuous life. More letters continue to be found and through digitisation and transcription they add to the distributed archive in collections, both public and private.  Image: Derek and Ellynne (Lyn) Challis with Jean Sweetman, Grey Lynn, 1980s, photographer: Penny Vernon The p...

The photography material in  Sir George Grey Special Collections  is made up of 500,000 images from the 1840s to the present day. Items in the collection include glass plate and film negatives, cartes de visite ,  daguerreotypes , postcards, watercolour paintings, drawings and original prints. The 250 individual photograph albums the library holds are a lovely but sometimes trickier-to-stumble-upon part of the collection. The photograph albums date from 1859 to the present day. Predictably, the subjects covered in the albums vary widely and include: tourist snaps, war time scenes, images of family, friends, animals, buildings, cities, landscapes, vehicles, forests, beaches, vessels, tangi/funerals, celebrations, parades, expeditions, council activities and royal visits. Some of the photograph albums have an entry on the Heritage Images database and only a selection of the images in the albums have been digitised. Ref: The inside cover and first page, with a dr...

This blog post looks at the Abercrombie family’s outings during the 1930s and 1940s. The memories of this West Auckland family were documented by Ken Abercrombie through 4 photo albums of exquisite hand-coloured family snaps. These albums are held at the West Auckland Research Centre and you can view the first album online . A significant and attractive feature of the albums is that the majority of the prints have been hand-coloured and captioned by the photographer. Ref: KRA-PA-02-049-00, Ken Abercrombie, Album 2, West Auckland Research Centre Ken Abercrombie (b.1916) was a keen photographer, first becoming interested as a 16 year old boy when his parents gave him a camera – a ‘Balovo’, a German make. Ref: Ken Abercrombie's camera, early 1930s, West Auckland Research Centre At this time the Abercrombie family were living in Blockhouse Bay where Ken’s father, Roy had started a carrying business. The photo below shows his International truck. Ref: KRA-PA-02-031-04, ...