Queen Street Railway Station
1890s (Likely by Albert Trevethan St George) - 2024
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1890s images: copies by JD Richardson of originals attributed to Albert Trevethan St George | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 4-982, 4-983
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Mind the Gap
These two 1890s photographs seem to have been made wth the intention of displaying them side-by-side to form a panoramic effect. They certainly seem to have been presented that way, with a small gap between them, when James Richardson made copies of prints of them (see below). But these images fall just short of joining up. Perhaps the photographer (presumed to be AT St George) did allow for an overlap in his original plates, but the prints that Richardson copied were cropped too tightly. In any case, St George was certainly capable of making two-image panoramas — below is an example from 1899.
Albert Trevethan St George | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections AWNS-18990630-05-02
As can be seen in the transition, St George's camera location is now inside Britomart Station (Auckland's old Chief Post Office) at the foot of Queen Street. (It's possible that the actual location is a few metres to the east—forward—of the 2024 position, but that would place it at an inaccessible point in mid-air high above the foot of the escalator.)
Below: a detail from one of Richardson's copies (4-983). Note that at right there is a glimpse of the right-hand image, showing that the prints Richardson copied were mounted side-by-side. The width of the gap between them is an accurate reflection of the missing part of the scene.
Below: a detail from the other Richardson copy (4-982).
As often noted eleswhere in this collection, these old-time panoramas composed of prints presented side-by-side had inevitable problems with perspective. This can be clearly seen in the 2024 images where there is a jarring change in perspective at the seam (less obvious in the 1890s scene where there is mostly featureless sky). Another issue was with parallax: even if the camera's position was fixed, rotating it to reframe the view almost always led to parallax errors; the way that the rails fail to line up in St George's image the nearer they are to the camera, may be an example of this. The only way to overcome these issues was, when using film, to employ specialised rotational panoramic cameras. These days the advent of digital imaging has enabled stitching and blending techniques that yield similarly seamless panoramas. Below is an example of applying these techniques to my two 2024 images above. The image is in spherical perspective, where vertical lines remain straight but horizontal lines are curved (click on image for a more detailed version).
Below: the then-and-now transition using this spherical panorama (click on image to toggle transition).
Dating the 1890s images
It seems likely that the pictures were taken in 1895. One of the advertisements in the scene, on the departures platform fence at right, is for "Blooker's Cocoa". A search of the National Library's Papers Past site yielded 81 newspaper ads for this product, spanning the years 1895 to 1903. Another example, from the building at far right, for "New Venus" tobacco, yielded newspaper ads from 1895 only.
