IN 1958, NEWLY WEDS GRACE AND
EUGENE ‘BUSTER’ RAWSON SET OFF ON
THEIR HONEYMOON IN A FORD VAN.
..........................................
They took a tent with them and, for four weeks,
zigzagged their way around the North and
South Islands of New Zealand. For Grace, it
was part pilgrimage – for the previous five
years, she had been working at Whites Aviation
in Auckland, hand-colouring photographs
of New Zealand landscapes. The trip was a
chance to visit spots she’d been painting to
make sure she’d been getting the colours right.
But more than anything, it was simply an
opportunity to see as much of the country as
possible. “Mr White started up an acceptance
and love of New Zealand for me,” she says.
Rawson wasn’t the only one; for decades from
the late ’40s, Whites Aviation’s hand-coloured
photographs could be found in virtually every
living room in the country, not to mention
offices, boardrooms, foyers and pubs. “Before
that, people only had prints of overseas
Old Masters on their walls,” Rawson says.
“Suddenly, we had all these lovely photographs
of New Zealand.”
Now, 90,000 negatives of Whites’ landscapes,
taken between 1945 and 1980, are housed
in the National Library of New Zealand’s
Alexander Turnbull Library. The hand-
coloured photos have also become collectable
items and the subject of a book, Hand-
Coloured New Zealand, written by Peter
Alsop. They can still be found in houses
and hotels, but, equally, are seen on the
walls of museums and galleries. “It’s one of
the most amazing projects in photographic
history,” says Shaune Lakin, senior curator
of photography at the National Gallery of
Australia. “You’ve got these really beautiful
landscapes that effectively cover the whole
country; I’m not sure of a similar project
anywhere, to be honest. In terms of historical
significance, it’s right up there.”The photographs, in fact, started as a sideline
for Whites Aviation. Leo White, a press
photographer and keen pilot, initially set up
the company to publish a number of aviation
periodicals and books, which he did very
successfully. He was joined soon after by his
old friend Clyde ‘Snow’ Stewart, who was also
a good photographer, and could even make his
own cameras at a pinch. (A favourite was one
he built around a Japanese lens he’d picked up
in Rabaul during the war.)One of their most popular books was Whites
Pictorial Reference of New Zealand, a collection
of 300 pages of black-and-white shots from all
over the country. In its first year of publishing,
in 1952, it sold 10,000 copies. It was reprinted
the following year, and updated in 1960. To
capitalise on its popularity, Whites started
producing postcards and tourist booklets.The company never owned its own planes;
instead it hired them from various spots
around New Zealand, and methodically
worked its way up and down the country.
Initially, before the general public got onto
Whites’ landscapes, the aerial photographic
side of the business involved taking shots of
farms, factories, and housing developments,
which they’d then try and sell to the relevant
businesses and government departments.Opposite, clockwise from top
A still from The Colourist,
a 2016 Loading Docs film about
Grace Rawson. Here Rawson
admires some of her handiwork:
a 1950 hand-coloured photo
of Queenstown.
Early aerial cameras were
large and cumbersome to use.
For smaller aircraft it was
sometimes necessary to remove
a door in order to properly hold
and use the camera.
Rawson and another ‘colouring
girl’ working on a large mural
in 1955. Murals like this
could take days for a team
of colourists to complete.While the practice of hand-colouring
photographs had been around virtually since
the birth of photography in the 19th century,
by the start of World War II it had started to
fall out of favour. Whites managed to buck
the trend; at a time when virtually no one
else was doing it, hand colouring became an
intrinsic part of its business. Though less
real-to-life, Whites’ photos were so artfully
painted they often looked better than the real
thing. (Or at least better than what colour
photography, still in its relative infancy,
could approximate.) And while Whites
eventually shut up shop in 1988, some of
their artists continued hand-colouring
photos until as late as 1996.Stewart was a skilled colourist, but never
coloured any photos for Whites. He snapped
the shots and ran the photographic lab,
leaving the colouring to a group of about
eight young women known as ‘the colouring
girls’, who shared a light-filled space in the
centre of Auckland.One of those young women was Grace
Rawson, who joined Whites at the age of 21.
She ended up working for the company for
about 10 years. “From the age of three I’d
wanted to be an artist,” she says. “I didn’t
actually believe I could paint an oil painting,
so joined up with photographic people.”Her original training was with an Auckland
studio that specialised in portraits and
miniatures of Old Masters – “ballet scenes
by Degas, that sort of thing” – which she sold
to finance an overseas trip. “I managed to
sell them for a pound each,” Rawson recalls,
“which was a lot of money in those days.”THOUGH LESS REAL-TO-LIFE,
WHITES’ PHOTOS WERE SO
ARTFULLY PAINTED THEY
OFTEN LOOKED BETTER THAN
THE REAL THING.
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