Central Auckland from the top of Shortland Street
1923 (Henry Winkelmann) - 2022
Click on image to toggle transition between two photographs
1923 panorama: Henry Winkelmann | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0487-PAN
Click here for a fullscreen version of this transition, or here for a bigger, scrollable version.
A four-plate panorama by Henry Winkelmann, digitally stitched (by Auckland Libraries), made on 8 October 1923, of the "City from top of Shortland Street" (as he noted in his ledger). This location must have been the rooftop of 93 Shortland Street, the six-storey Shortland Flats building, which was still under construction at the time.
Winkelmann—whose penchant for aerial imaging saw him scaling ship's masts, cranes, church towers, chimneys, fire brigade bell-towers and the like—wasted no time in taking advantage of this new opportunity for an elevated vantage point for his camera, perhaps mingling with carpenters, bricklayers and plasterers as he set up his tripod near the north-western corner of the rooftop.
In addition to the four plates he exposed to make the panorama above, Winkelmann made at least two more exposures that day from the same position but with a different camera setup that yielded a wider field of view (presumably by using a lens of shorter focal length). Below is my attempt at stitching these two plates. Click on the image for a fullscreen version.
Henry Winkelmann | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0337 and 1-W0338
Although this panorama doesn't match the four-plate panorama in its horizontal angle of view, it does show more at top and bottom. (Given that it has the same starting point at left, looking toward Albert Park, I can't help wondering why it doesn't extend as far to the right as the four-plate version; was there perhaps a third wide-angle plate that, for whatever reason, is now lost?)
Below: Winkelmann's two panoramas scaled and overlaid.
In any case, Winkelmann seems not to have regarded these two plates as forming a panorama (or, perhaps, not a successful one). Unlike the four-image panorama plates, which are recorded in his ledger on a page devoted to panoramas of Auckland, these two are consigned to another page headed 'Sundry views of Auckland'.
As ever, it's worth remembering that multi-image panoramas like these could only be displayed as individual prints mounted side-by-side (digital stitching would not become possible until the 1990s). Below is a mockup of how these two plates could have looked had they been printed (with some dodging and burning), trimmed and presented in that way. The distortion toward the edges of the plates caused by the use of a wide-angle camera setup, and thus the abrupt change in perspective at the seam, is evident. It's not a pleasing effect; perhaps it was on aesthetic grounds that Winkelmann chose not to include this pair in his index of panoramas. A more straightforward explanation might be that he simply overlooked the fact that these two plates formed a panorama when he compiled his ledger. (It's thought that this ledger was created to record the negatives he sold to the Old Colonists Museum on his retirement in 1928.)
Below: for comparison, the four-plate panorama images presented in the same way. See the foot of this page for a 1925 example of a two-print Winkelmann panorama.
Details
Below: Horses and horseless carriages. The wide-angle view shows rather more of Shortland Street, as seen in this then-and-now image pair. Click on image for transition.
Below: One of the few buildings common to both the 1923 and 2022 views is the three-storey Jackson and Russell Building (1918) at 23 Shortland Street, on the corner of O'Connell Street (at centre). Click on the image for a then-and-now transition.
Below: Hemmed in by high-rise buildings, the modern rooftop view affords just one miniscule glimpse of the horizon, in the direction of the suburb of Ponsonby, showing the tower of the Catholic Bishop's House. Click on the image for a then-and-now transition.
Below: at left, Shortland Flats is at centre in this detail from a 1927 Winkelmann photograph (Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0761-PAN). The circle indicates the spot on the rooftop where Winkelmann must have positioned his camera for his panoramas. At right, a recent shot of the building.
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Below is an example where Winkelmann has printed and mounted two pictures (from 1925) side-by-side to form a panorama, and then photographed the result. (The re-photographing process has resulted in a general loss of image quality, virtually unavoidable in the analogue era.)
Henry Winkelmann | Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections 1-W0715
