Hocken Legacy

President of the Otago Institute for a period, his gift as a watercolourist was also recognised during his lifetime and has continued to be acknowledged at exhibitions over the last 30 years at the Dunedin Public Art Gallery and Hocken. That he found time in his busy life to pursue an interest in photography has remained obscure, but can be brought to light now largely thanks to the estate left by his eldest daughter, Marion.

Marion Scott Playing the Piano c.1904, J.H. Scott photograph. Marion Scott Collection, P97-050-524, Hocken Collections. S14-031b.

Scott joined the Dunedin Photographic Society (DPS) in 1892, two years after the society's inception. Already a prominent member of the Otago Art Society, he and art society president William Mathew Hodgkins had led a movement to combine the activities of the two organisations and ended up joining the photographers on their own terms.

A selection of Scott's photographs is on exhibition at the Hocken Library alongside the work of some of his associates, providing an insight into the activities of the amateur group of photographers. Each month, members of the society produced studies on a given subject such as harbour scenes, the figure, interiors, architecture and portraiture, and met to critique each other's work, share knowledge, learn new techniques and discuss any problems encountered.

The society held popular annual exhibitions with the 1894 show drawing nearly 1,000 visitors. Members also organised outings together; an excursion to Otago Heads resulted in Scott and Hodgkins' most significant portraits of the Karetai family.

Scott had a penchant for painting oval or circular-shaped vignettes ̶ like the view through a port hole ̶ and looking through a camera, he continued to frame what he saw into pictorialist images of people and places closest to his heart. Scott's wife, Helen, also took photographs during her short life and at times she must have been the one to close the shutter on her husband and their five children.

The results leave us with peeps of the Scotts' world taken between c.1893-1914: a record of the life and times of a prominent Dunedin man and his family; the environs of the University of Otago and Dunedin Hospital; domestic interiors of several notable homes; glimpses of Māori living around Moeraki; and the Hampden area, where the family went for holidays.

DR ANNA PETERSEN
Photographs Curator, Hocken Collections

Banner: Portrait of John Halliday Scott and Marion Scott, c.1898, photographer unknown. Marion Scott Collection, P97-032, Hocken Collections Uare Taoka o Hākena, University of Otago. S14-032e.