The invention of photography was announced in Paris in 1839 and Europe's industrial and scientific cultures were quick to recognise photography's potential as a remarkable new tool for recording and classifying the physical world as it was being revealed through exploration and colonisation. Some of New Zealand's earliest professional photographers were called on to record gold fields and battlefields.

New Zealand itself - on the opposite side of the globe to Europe - was an exotic land and photographs of its natural features and indigenous people were sought after. In our 'special-effects' time it's hard to imagine just how wondrous these images must have seemed. But, as you look at early photographs, presented in this section, some of them 150 years old, try thinking about how they would have appeared to someone your own age at the time they were taken.