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Take a trip down memory lane at the Feeling for Daylight: The Jack Adamson Collection exhibition, in the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre at Mt Cook Village and discover an inspiring photographic legacy that documents the people and places around The Hermitage during its late 19th century settlement.
 
Adamson’s images are historical testimony to an era when mountaineers began discovering the heights of the Southern Alps in Aoraki Mount Cook National Park. Captured on glass-plate photographs, his unique collection, made up of character studies, topographical views and candid life shots, comes from a treasured period in New Zealand history.
 
 
About The Jack Adamson Collection
 
The Jack Adamson Collection is a rare and unique collection of glass plate photographs. Together with the selection of photographs, Adamson’s cameras and other items appear in the exhibition that his descendents have placed into the care of the South Canterbury Museum.
 
This amazing collection will be carefully transported to Aoraki Mt Cook in February 2011 and displayed in the Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre, a location that Jack Adamson once called home.
 
Adamson started taking photographs when employed at the Aoraki Mt Cook Hermitage in 1889. He was the first New Zealand-born guide to work at the Mt Cook Hermitage and became the Hermitage Hotel manager in 1893.
 
Pat Adamson, Jack Adamson's grandson, has been instrumental in ensuring the preservation of these delicate glass plates, which date from the late nineteenth century. The unique documentary record that his grandfather's photographs contain is, he believes, a legacy to the nation. The Adamson family’s selfless placement of the collection into the care of the South Canterbury Museum enables this unique collection to be available to the public and helps ensure the long-term protection of Jack Adamson's work.
 
The exhibition takes viewers on a stunning photographic journey around the Southern Alps and early settler communities on the eastern and western side of the mountains. A hundred years away from rescue helicopters it documents early mountaineers doing daredevil moves at time when the Southern Alps were far more isolated than they are today. Adamson captured some of the pivotal moments in the history of early mountaineering. His photographs include wonderful character studies, beautiful topographical views and his work contains a surprising array of emotion -- the everyday, the humorous and moments of spontaneity that were rare for this period of photography.
 
The photographs have been sumptuously reproduced in the accompanying book Feeling for Daylight: The photographs of Jack Adamson. The author, Rhian Gallagher, received a Canterbury Community Historian grant in 2007. Gallagher sets Adamson's photography in context, unraveling some of the complicated twists and turns of his story that would in the end reduce Adamson to the point of bankruptcy.
 
Tony Rippin, Curator of Documentary History - South Canterbury Museum, and Rhian Gallagher have worked in collaboration on the design and production of the book.
 
The exhibition will run at the Aoraki Mount Cook National Park, Sir Edmund Hillary Alpine Centre from February 4 – April 3 2011. The book is available for purchase for $49.99.