Pou Tiaki: Photographer captures Tā Moko though different lenses

Friday, 17 July 2020

Photos of Robert Ruha taken by Michael Bradley show how the more than century old wet-plate method of photography erases tattoo pigment.

Michael Bradley hopes an obsolete photographic technique that erases tā moko will give viewers of his exhibition Puaki pause about their relationship with Māoridom.

Photographer Michael Bradley wanted to reference New Zealand's colonial history and celebrate the renaissance of MÄori culture in his exhibition Puaki.

Two images were taken each of 23 people who wear tā moko – once using a modern digital camera and again with an obsolete collodion wet-plate technique first developed in the mid 19th-century.

The modern camera brings all the details and colour of his subjects’ face into focus. The older style is just as sharp but the image is black and white, and it erases any trace of the tā moko.

He was fascinated by how the chemical process of the wet-plate technique did not pick up the pigment in the tattoos and in doing so, helped nearly erase the cultural markers from history.

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Photos of Tania Riwai taken by photographer Michael Bradley for his exhibition Puaki. Riwai says her generation did not grow up being exposed to ta moko and she decided to get her own as “a reclamation of who we are”.

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In Puaki the two portraits of each subject are shown side-by-side.

The wet-plate medium acknowledges the colonial period of New Zealand’s history and the suppression of Māori culture that came with it, while the digital photos show where the country is today.

“It references our history and celebrates the renaissance in Māori culture. Hopefully people can have a good, hard look, and it gives them an opportunity to reflect – maybe they’ll want to find out more [about Māori culture and history].

While researching the technique he found some photographers during New Zealand’s colonisation period tried to use make-up to highlight tā moko, or attempted to draw them back on after the image had been developed.

In many cases the photographs were left without restoring the tā moko. The only clue to their existence, the scars wrought by the hammer and chisel that carved the patterns into the wearer’s flesh.

Tania Riwai, of Ngāti Raukawa and Ngāti Maniapoto, has proudly worn her moko kauae for 15 years. Back in 2005, she says you hardly ever saw people wearing ta moko – not that it’s all that common today.

“You were lucky if you had old people with [ta moko] around you. [Charles] Goldie paintings were the only places we ever saw them].”

She was pleased to sit for Bradley to help share a cultural practice and art form that was nearly lost.

“It's a reclamation of who we are – a way of telling our stories. Why put it on my face? I could write it down, but this is my way of telling people ‘this is who I am, this is where I come from’.”

Puaki will be on display at Expressions Whirinaki, 836 Fergusson Drive, Upper Hutt, between September 12 and November 29 this year.