Behind the scenes at museum

Edward’s son John Millard is dressed in his driving garb. He was fond of cars and motorbikes and would wear the goggles when driving his open-top Austin. Pictures supplied

Dudley Meadows, curator of the Millard Studio exhibition at Tairāwhiti Museum, will give a floor talk at the museum on Sunday, January 21, where he will share some of the untold stories behind the photographs.

He will also give more background information and personal thoughts about how the exhibition was put together.

The exhibition features the work of Edward Arthur Millard who established and operated a photographic studio in Gisborne from 1915 until his untimely death in 1933.

The museum received a donation from the Millard Studio in August 2020 and after a month of sifting through the material, it became obvious an exhibition could be possible at the completion of the cataloguing, Mr Meadows said.

After doing a first sweep of the offered material which included glass plates, negatives and hand-coloured prints, the museum then set about cataloguing it into the museum database.

Each negative was cleaned then scanned and processed into a positive and derivative copies were made from a master.

These images are now available to the public using the collections-online portal on the museum website. There are more than 2000 images to peruse.

The photographs conveyed a conservative, competent studio photographer whose work is very clean and precise. Technical skills are very evident as is the finishing quality of prints.

As the museum began curating the collection it became apparent that Edward also had a very free, artistic spirit evident in his oil paintings and more experimental nude photography.

The family was also involved in music and theatre. The name of first-born Nellie Millard can be found through newspapers of the 1920s, succeeding in music studies and theatre. All the daughters became involved with singing, dancing and acting. Edward photographed many of the productions, but went a step beyond, recreating scenes and characters within his studio.

The Millard Studio exhibition is a fascinating glimpse into the past. It also features excellent examples of retouching using various techniques such as hand colouring where photographs were over-painted with oils. Another retouching technique was the use of transparent colour washes over the print which were more common especially before the advent of the colour negative.

The floor talk will take place at Tairāwhiti Museum at 2pm on Sunday, January 21.