We are all participants in an increasingly visual culture, yet we rarely give thought to the ways that photographs shape our experience and understanding of the world and the historical past. This book looks at a range of New Zealand photographs up to 1918 and analyzes them as photo-objects, considering how they were made, who made them, what they show, and how our understanding of them can vary or change over time. This emphasis on the materiality of the photograph is a new direction in scholarship on colonial photographs. The contributors include photographers, museum curators, academics, and other researchers. Their essays offer a variety of ways in which to read the images they have chosen. In the course of the book, they explore a host of issues related to the development of photography in New Zealand. World War I is the end point, as it coincided with profound cultural shifts with the expansion of the mass-illustrated press and the rise of consumer photography, as well as a change in New Zealand"s place in the world. The book also includes a guide to New Zealand photographic collections and contains an extensive bibliography of related works.