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Original Articles

Art, Science, and Photography: New Zealand Illustrator John Buchanan

Pages 90-103 | Published online: 18 May 2015

  • Herbert Boucher Dobbie, New Zealand Ferns: 148 Varieties (Auckland: H. Dobbie, 1880).
  • The Transactions were originally printed by private contractors, but the work was taken over in 1888 by the Government Printer. Volume 1 was reprinted, with additions, by the Government Printer in 1875. See Wilbur A. Glue, History of the Government Printing Office (Wellington: R.E. Owen Government Printer, 1966), 83.
  • Gil Docking, Two Hundred Years of New Zealand Painting (Melbourne: Lansdowne, 1971).
  • Nancy M. Adams, ‘Buchanan, John’, in Dictionary of New Zealand Biography: Te Ara: The Encyclopedia of New Zealand, www.TeAra.govt.nz/en/biographies/1b42/buchanan-john.
  • Nancy M. Adams, ‘John Buchanan FLS: Botanist and Artist’, Tuhinga, no. 13 (2002): 71–115.
  • With David Galloway, I convened a two-day symposium aimed at reconciling these two aspects. University of Otago, 29–30 November 2012.
  • I related this carte-de-visite to several of Buchanan's own composite photographs in which he appears with his most significant male companion
  • David Wallace. See Linda Tyler, ‘Seeing Double: Autobiographical Contrivance in a Nineteenth Century Photograph’, Art New Zealand, no. 144, Summer 2012–3: 68–9.
  • John Tagg, The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 5.
  • Peter Robertson, ‘Photography and the Geological Survey of Canada’, Archivist 19, no. 3 (1991): 11–3.
  • ‘A Glance at the New Zealand Exhibition’, Colonist 8, no. 770, 10 March 1865; 2.
  • See Linda Tyler, ‘John Buchanan (1819–98): Investigating His Work as a Calico Pattern Designer’, Context, no. 21 (November 2010): 23–33.
  • Kathleen Davidson, ‘Museum Traffic: Nineteenth-Century Photography and the Reframing of Natural History’, unpublished paper presented at Nation Empire Globe, a postgraduate conference at the University of Sydney, 9 July 2008.
  • ‘Certificate as a Corresponding Member of the Natural History Society of Glasgow’, 29 October 1867, Hocken Collections, University of Otago, Dunedin, MS-0603/013.
  • William Keddie FRSE (1809–77), a scientist and collector, was an editor of the Scottish Guardian newspaper for twenty-three years. He was also a Professor of Natural Science in the Free Church College in Glasgow and a founder member of the Council of the Glasgow Archaeological Association. As the Secretary of the Glasgow Philosophical Society, he was the editor of its Transactions, which published the report of the meeting where Buchanan's photographs were shown.
  • Ross to Buchanan, 1865, in ‘Correspondence of John Buchanan 1819–1898 FLS Draughtsman to the Geological Survey of New Zealand’, Mitchell Library, Sydney, CY105 A644, 253.
  • These albums are in the collection of Toitu Otago Settlers Museum, Dunedin, and Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington.
  • Now in the Geological and Nuclear Sciences Library, Avalon, Lower Hutt.
  • Acquired 19 January 1867, Second Annual Report (Wellington: Colonial Museum and Geological Survey).
  • Hector Papers, Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa Archives. I am indebted to Hector's biographer, Simon Nathan, for supplying copies of the receipts for photographic chemicals and equipment supplied to Hector and the Otago Geological Survey in the period 1862–4.
  • In the Buchanan albums, Toitu Otago Settlers Museum, Dunedin.
  • Colonial Museum and Geological Survey Annual Report for 1871, Acquisition 472, 12 May 1871, autographed letter from Frederick Scott Archer, inventor of the collodion process, donated by J.C. Crawford.
  • W.T.L. Travers, ‘Notes on the Practice of Outdoor Photography’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, no. 4 (1871): 160–4.
  • Lissa Mitchell, ‘Promotional Landscapes: D.L. Mundy's “Photographic Experiences in New Zealand”’, Tuhinga, no. 20 (2009): 68.
  • Athol McCredie, ‘Collecting Photographs: The Development of Te Papa's Historical Photography Collection’, Tuhinga, no. 20 (2009): 51.
  • Wilbur A. Glue, History of the Government Printing Office, 131.
  • John McGregor, Dunedin FL.1863–1884, Portrait of John Buchanan [1865], Alexander Turnbull Library, Photographs Collection, PA2-1079.
  • James Hector, ‘Cnemiornis Calcitrans Owen Showing Its Affinity to Lamellirostrate Natafores’, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute, vol. 6 (1873). Buchanan's whole-page lithographed illustration is tipped in between pages 76 and 77.
  • Letter, John Buchanan to Georgina Hetley, undated (ca. 1885), Hetley family papers, private collection, Christchurch.
  • William Jackson Hooker was Regius Professor of Botany at Glasgow University, 1820–41.
  • Graham Smith, ‘Talbot and Botany: The Bertoloni Album’, History of Photography 17, no. 1, Spring 1993; 40.
  • William Jackson Hooker to William Henry Fox Talbot, in The Correspondence of William Henry Fox Talbot, ed. Larry Schaaf, Fox Talbot Collection, British Library, London, Document number 3895, 21 June 1839, http://foxtalbot.dmu.ac.uk/letters/transcript.
  • Graham Smith, ‘Talbot and Botany’, 42.
  • Carol Armstrong and Catherine de Zegher, ‘Flowers: World and Word’, Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004). Published on the occasion of the exhibition Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature, organised by the Drawing Center in association with Yale Center for British Art. Drawing Center, New York, 26 March-22 May 2004, and Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT, 12 June-8 August 2004.
  • Naomi Hume, ‘The Nature Print and Photography in the 1850s’, History of Photography 35. no. 1, February 2011; 44.
  • John Buchanan, Manual of the Indigenous Grasses of New Zealand (Wellington: Colonial Museum and Geological Survey, 1880).
  • Naomi Hume, ‘The Nature Print and Photography’, 44.
  • Lorraine Dalston and Peter Galison, ‘The Image of Objectivity’, Representations, no. 40, Autumn 1992; 81–128, www.jstor.org/stable/2928741.
  • There are several hundred drawings in the Alexander Turnbull Library; a collection of photographs in the Geological and Nuclear Sciences Library at Avalon; over 1000 pressed botanical specimens, letters, drawings, and watercolours in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa; sixty-four prepared and mounted holotypes and isotypes and foolscap notebook with 180 botanical illustrations in the Auckland Institute and Museum; sixteen watercolours and thirteen notebooks in the Hocken Library at the University of Otago; three albums in the archive at Toitu Otago Settlers Museum; and a letterbook containing over 400 items of correspondence in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, the city where Peter Buchanan, who was residuary legatee for John Buchanan's estate, was Assistant Government Printer.
  • John McGregor had a studio in Princes Street, Dunedin, and was also commissioned to make a carte-de-visite of James Hector, and other members of the Otago Geological Survey. These conform to the conventions established by Henry Maull and George Henry Polyblank in their production of images of famous men, compiled as the Literary and Scientific Portrait Club in 1855, and now in the National Portrait Gallery, London.
  • Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury cite an article in the 15 January 1865 issue of US photographic magazine Humphrey's Journal that explained how to use a masking plate holder, or place a light-absorbing screen between the camera and subject during two exposures, in order to produce a double portrait. They note that this method was copied by Adelaide photographer Philip Marchant that same year. They also quote the South Australian Register from 23 May 1865, where there is a description of a carte-de-visite that sounds similar to the McGregor portrait of Buchanan: ‘Mr G.J. Freeman of Hindley-street, has left a carte de visite at our office, which we believe is a curiosity in photography. The carte contains two portrait of the same gentleman, one sitting, without his hat and looking upward, and the other standing, with his hat on, and looking downward. They are evidently portraits of one person. What the process is which presents a double portrait of the same gentleman, in different costume and position, we cannot say; but the thing is ingenious.’ Cited in Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury, The Mechanical Eye in Australia: Photography 1841–1900 (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1985), 54.
  • Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life: Cartes-de-Visite and the Bourgeois Imagination’, in Photography: Theoretical Snapshots, ed. J.J. Long, Andrea Noble, and Edward Welch (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), 92.
  • Craigie Horsfield, ‘Ocean Flowers: World and Word’, in Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature, 194–5.
  • Jennifer Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 4.
  • See Fred Gettings, Ghosts in Photographs: The Extraordinary Story of Spirit Photography (New York: Harmony Books, 1978) for the narrative of how accident morphed into intentional manipulation.
  • ‘Photography of the Invisible’, Press 22, no. 2678, 7 March 1874; 6. This history is outlined by Martyn Jolly in Faces of the Living Dead: The Belief in Spirit Photography (London: British Library, 2006). The idea of the spirit in religion, science, and art and how it was used by photographers historically is explained in John Harvey's Photography and Spirit (London: Reaktion Books, 2007). The history of photography's relationship to the paranormal is given in the catalogue to a 2004 Metropolitan Museum exhibition, Clément Chéroux et al., The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).
  • Marina Warner, ‘Insubstantial Pageants: Spirit Visions, Soul Traces’, in Blur of the Otherworldly: Contemporary Art, Technology, and the Paranormal,ed. Mark Alice Durant and Jane D. Marsching (Baltimore: Baltimore Centre for Art and Visual Culture, University of Maryland, 2006), 23.
  • The New York-based Fox sisters, Maggie and Kate, with Leah, who functioned as their manager, are usually credited with inaugurating communication with the spirits of the dead in 1848. It rapidly became extremely fashionable with both men and women. The history of spiritualist belief and practice has been the subject of extensive debate. See, for example, Bob Gilbert, ed., The Rise of Victorian Spiritualism (London: Routledge, 2001), in nine volumes. Spiritualism and gender is explored in the two-volume collection, Bridget Bennett, Helen Nicholson, and Roy Porter, eds., Women, Spiritualism, and Madness (London: Routledge, 2003). In 2014, Patricia Pulham, Christine Ferguson, and Rosario Arias will publish a new large history Spiritualism 1840–1930 with Routledge.
  • Shaun Broadley, ‘Spirited Visions: A Study of Spiritualism in New Zealand Settler Society, 1870–90’ (PhD. diss., University of Otago, Dunedin, 2000).
  • ‘“Spirit Photography” Frauds’, New Zealand Tablet 37, no. 1, 7 January 1909; 9. See also Louis Kaplan, The Strange Case of William Mumler: Spirit Photographer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
  • Gareth Winter, New Zealand Journal of Photography, no. 26, February 1997; 25–7.
  • Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Dreams of Ordinary Life’, 82.

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