Picturing loss: Family, photographs and the Great War

Abstract

During World War I 100 000 New Zealand men, some 9% of the population, travelled from the ‘uttermost ends of the earth’ to fight in the Middle East and on the Western Front. This war exodus was a historic first, a vast outflow of New Zealanders to the other side of the world over a concentrated period and for a purpose explicitly understood to have imperial and national significance. At the war's end some 16 697 New Zealanders were buried far from home, 5325 of whom were without a grave. As a consequence, photographs of soldiers were invested with unforeseen emotional meanings and put to changing uses in both public and private settings. Without bodies to grieve over, the photographs of the soldiers facilitated the return of the dead in both private and public settings. In place of soldiers' bodies, the New Zealand public confronted their pre-war studio portraits, cropped and collectivized into Rolls of Honour. In the privacy of their homes, families used the photographs of soldiers as referents for absent bodies and as artefacts of mourning and memory. There is a need to reincorporate this private, familial memory into the larger story of New Zealand war remembrance.