Buller and Westland Photographic Project

Every Summer my mother Valerie Benjamin and I return to Westport, my father Harry's home town. Mum met Dad there in 1949 when, as a visiting nurse, she went into the local UFS Buller Pharmacy and asked the apprentice chemist if he'd mind taking her exposed film out of her Box Brownie for her.
Dad died suddenly in 1973 aged 44. There's so much I would like to know about his life growing up in Westport. But by returning, and wandering about with mum wherever our fancy takes us, I find connections to his (and her) past and to my own jumble of childhood memories of the Coast.
Dad's great grandparents, German-born Frederic William Nahr and his Irish wife Rachel moved to Charleston in the late 1860s to start a hotel. The family has been connected to the region, and particularly to its pubs, ever since.
One of the hotels pictured - at Granity - has now been demolished.

http://picasaweb.google.com/114511309688942105420/JulieBenjaminWestCoastPhotographicProject?authkey=Gv1sRgCLP7sJiX3uGHdA#

Doctoral Thesis

Below is a link to my University of Auckland Dept of Film, Television and Media Studies doctoral thesis on the 35mm slide photography of Gladys Cunningham:

http://hdl.handle.net/2292/4964

Student work

Below are links to blogs created by stage 2 students on a new course, FTVMS 219 Memory and Media, which I taught on in Semester 2 2010 at University of Auckland.

While they had also written two essays for their course work, their blog gave students a chance to think about theories concerning memory, nostalgia, trauma and forgetting, then use them in a memory project of their own design. Several students chose to base their assignment on photographs.

http://ellasmediaandmemoryassignment.blogspot.com/

http://vetkakiwi.blogspot.com/ (see September post)

http://rach-mem-task.blogspot.com/