A Pictorialist Practice: The Life and Times of Thelma Kent

Thelma Kent was a well-known pictorialist photographer of her day, highly regarded for her photographs of the landscape of the South Island. Born in 1899, she was active in the decades of the 1920s and 1930s and throughout the war years before her early death in 1946. Her short life encapsulates a fascinating period in the history of New Zealand photography and focuses this thesis on to a previously little studied window. Kent reflected a lot of the dominant ideals and passions of photographic practice and thus becomes an exemplar of her times. Only a small amount of research has previously been attempted on Kent‘s life and work because fragmentary photographic archives yielded few clues. I solved this by concentrating on her published photographs and writings in the nation‘s newspapers and magazines, which proved to be extensive, and provided new insights in to photographic practices of the era. I also used the tools of the biographer; electoral rolls, directories, and interviews with individuals with links to Kent to enable a broader view of my subject. Chapter one looks at Kent‘s early years and examines the biographical methods involved in researching an individual‘s life. Chapter two explores Kent‘s love of travel to remote corners of the South Island to capture photographs. These images fed the nation‘s craze for travel and recreation in an era where new forms of transport such as cars and rail opened up the countryside to droves of ordinary New Zealanders. Chapter three delves into Kent‘s more adventurous trips, particularly to regions in the Southern Alps, and looks at her written accounts and photographs from these journeys. Chapter four shows Kent‘s involvement with camera clubs, photographic salons and the paths that a pictorialist photographer could take to gain national and international exposure. The final chapter looks at Kent mature career during the war years, a time when photographers faced challenges to their practices in terms of limitations of materials and subject matter.