Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer
by Athol McCredie

Rising like the Marie Celeste, the ghost ship of legend, the previously shrouded life’s work of Wairarapa based photographer Leslie Adkin (1888–1964) emerges from this beguiling account by Te Papa curator photography Athol McCredie as the carefully curated oeuvre of an amateur auteur: our own provincial Fellini.

Arrival at the Hydrabad, 27 December 1909. Waitārere Beach, with the wreck of the Hydrabad in the background. Back row: Clifford Adkin (paddling), Gilbert Adkin, Jimmy Cameron, Reggie Thurlow (both farm workers for the Adkins), Dora Adkin, Will Herd, Marjorie Adkin, Gertie Herd. Front row: Miss Main (housekeeper), Alice Herd, Olive Herd, William Adkin, Maud, Clare Adkin, Ralph Herd, Kate Denton, Vivian Adkin, John Herd?, Elizabeth Herd, William Herd, Hugh Herd. Gelatin glass negative, half plate, B.022783

The best photographers have a signature visual language, derived from framing, lighting, subject matter or some other ineffable point-of-view. That this should be so is remarkable given the supposed mechanical neutrality of the camera shutter, exposure timings, chemical reactions baked into film, dark room procedures and ultimately the ‘indifference’ of light itself.

Nonetheless, a photograph from the pre-digital analogue era by Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus, Brian Brake or Ans Westra carries the swagger of an authored original by a singular talent or ‘eye.’ The same can be said of Gilbert Adkin with a giant cauliflower at Cheslyn Rise (c.1910), one of numerous magical images in which Adkin’s wider family function as dramatis personae in an Edwardian version of film-maker Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums – knowing participants in a family saga.

Gilbert Adkin with a giant cauliflower at Cheslyn Rise, c.1910. Gelatin glass negative, half plate, B.022534

However, unlike an Anderson film or the globally published iconic images of the canonical photographers mentioned above, the Adkin family ‘box-set’ remained very much ‘in camera’ held within the orbit of his delightful extended family and most particularly his wife Maud.

It’s common to hear the phrase that the camera ‘loves’ someone. Clearly Leslie loved Maud. And it’s near impossible not to be drawn into their intimate web of tenderness and gentle regard, as McCredie has been: ‘I’m not the first person to have vicariously fallen in love with Maud through Adkin’s photographs.’

The chapter simply entitled Maud is a Michelin guide to their six-year courtship, engagement and early married life wherein, to quote the author, in ‘(apparently) simpler, happier’ times, they made their own fun. Images with jaunty titles such as Her New Plymouth Buoy, 17 December 1915 or Ice cream sodas, 6 March 1914 show Leslie and Maud living their best life, canoodling or on honeymoon on the Taranaki riviera, and documenting almost every loved-up moment including a re-enactment of their engagement at Maud’s family home in Hastings also dated 6 March 1914.

These revealing visual narratives are contained in immaculately arranged photo albums, which remained the sole preserve of Adkin family until these, along with over 8000 negatives and transparencies were donated to The National Art Gallery and the Turnbull Library in 1965.

Ice cream sodas, 6 March 1914. Maud and Leslie at the Herd family home in Hastings. A remote shutter release is probably hidden by his cap. Gelatin glass negative, quarter plate, A.006526

As the title suggests, Leslie Adkin’s day job was as a farmer near Levin in the Wairarapa. He was also a highly regarded amateur archaeologist, geologist, student of Māori sites of significance, collector of artefacts and father. His was a busy life, fastidiously documented. Adkin has proved to be uncannily prescient. His assiduous record keeping prepared him, a century later, for the posthumous attention his perspicacious eye and wry sense of humour warrants.

Adkin was a dedicated diarist, his records provide a granular account of the life journey of a ‘renaissance man of sorts’. One example illustrates via a highly detailed hand-drawn map and itinerary, a three-day road trip from Levin, via Taupō to Whanganui in May 1934. Every photograph site is annotated and numbered, along with exact distances between locations, enabling the author to match archive images to the moment of their creation. But wait, there’s more:

He numbered photographs from specific expeditions in his diary and included these numbers on the maps to indicate where he had taken each one. Not only that, but he would draw an arrow from the numbers to show the direction of view. The diary, photographs and maps were an integrated, multi-media recording system.

Adkin was a fastidious researcher and chronicler of almost every aspect of his life. At the age of 22 in 1909, his documentation of the topography of the Ōhau river near Levin, complete with his own maps of the previously unsurveyed area and documentary photographs was published by the New Zealand Institute (forerunner of the Royal Society of New Zealand) and presented to that ‘body of grave and reverend seigneurs’ no less than the Wellington Philosophical Society.

Leslie Adkin went on to apply similar application and attain a noted level of self-trained expertise across a wide field of interests such that on his death at the age of 71 ‘he was a public figure, recognised mainly for his work in the field of archaeology and for his knowledge about Māori place names and history in the Horowhenua and Wellington areas.’

But photography was, as the images that adorn the pages of Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer demonstrate, much more than a hobby, more even than a passion, it appears to have been his calling. So it is baffling but also compelling, as a personal biography, that Adkin appeared more than content to be moderately well-known in Levin – and to leave posterity and later curators and writers such as Athol McCredie to do the job of finding an audience for a superlative photographic talent.

Adkin is something of a puzzle. He was a dedicated photographer who, eschewing the studio, worked almost exclusively outdoors with either deft wit or cinematic scale as his creative axes. For good measure add the attendant equipment, people- and scene-wrangling his most ambitious photographs demonstrate.  After all that planning, execution and finally exhaustive production documentation he never really sought out the acclaim, critical engagement or audience response over four decades of sustained creative output. His level of ambition in this regard appears to have been satisfied by publishing the odd Levin street scene or landscape in the Auckland Weekly News in the 1920s or winning a handful of prizes in the photography section of the Levin Horticultural Show.

Adkin did not even join one of the ubiquitous camera clubs that sprung up in the early twentieth century, but in that there may have been a stylistic payoff: ‘Adkin’s lack of membership of a camera club helped shelter him from the impact of pictorialism, but he was not ignorant of the movement.’ An Adkin photograph’s signature is clarity of design and tone – the opposite of the woozy romantic haze and smudgy, painterly atmospherics of the pictorialists, amongst whom George Chance (1885–1963) is perhaps the most well-known today.

But relative obscurity does not mean isolation. Adkin was an assiduous record keeper and maintained voluminous scrapbooks titled ‘Art’, with taxonomic cuttings on photography and stylistic interpretations and commentary. All ‘these photographic studies, from mountains to bathing beauties interested Adkin.’

Unknown photographer. Off for a cooler, 26 December 1927. Mrs Smith (housekeeper to William Adkin) and Nancy on the near running board, Vivian Adkin in the driver’s seat, Leslie and Maud standing at rear, Clyde on the bonnet. Ōtaki Beach. Gelatin glass negative, half plate, B.022131/02

But Adkin reserved his best work for the intimate dynamics of his family life, within which, for decades he enrolled his wife, children, brothers and sisters, friends and random stragglers into carefully planned and at times ambitious mise-en-scène tableau that were created almost entirely for the pleasure of the players – those in on the gag. Clearly, they all had a lot of fun and were more than willing participants. It is telling to note that so many of the images take place in high summer in the days immediately after Christmas. I imagine such scenes would have been a family ritual, and as the holiday season approached there would have been much speculation as to what Uncle Leslie would come up with next. In this sense, Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer is a gift, one that will sit in many homes as a de facto photo album of family life for European settlers in provincial Aotearoa before WWII.

But it was not all merry japes, brisk walks and prize-winning produce. From the mid 1920s Adkin made over 140 excursions as an amateur archaeologist and documenter of Māori sites of significance as well as scenes from the life of members of the Muaūpoko iwi. Some of these images, although valuable for recording mana whenua activities at this time also will have some viewers feeling more than a little queasy about the effects of the thriving colonial settler population on iwi and hapu in the Horowhenua. Adkin ‘may never have had a clear mandate to speak on behalf of Māori, but nevertheless today many value both his documentation of their knowledge and his photographic record.’

Leslie Adkin: Farmer Photographer arrives as a discovery and a revelation. McCredie has spent a lifetime looking at, thinking and writing about photography, particularly those aspects that perhaps only the passage of time can fully illuminate. That Leslie and Maud – to quote the song – were the ‘fondest of lovers’ is the great theme of the publication. I can think of few books I’ve read in recent times with such a sense of wide-eyed wonder. This was clearly McCredie’s experience during its creation and his intent in publishing. ‘I would like to think readers’ hearts will leap with delight when they open the book,’ he says. Adkin’s ‘photographs display a love of being in the world and wanting to record it all.’