Looking east across Queen Street opposite Vulcan Lane
1905 (Muir & Moodie) - 2021
Click on image to toggle transition between two photographs
1905 image: Muir & Moodie studio, Dunedin. Te Papa (C.010857)
Image comparison slider version
Click here for a fullscreen version of this transition and here for a short animation of these images.
This George Moodie photograph is one of the most memorable images of old Auckland. In the words of photo-historian William Main:
George Moodie created something of a masterpiece when he exposed this plate. Unknowingly the people have become the point of interest. Examined closely their characters emerge. The shoeless urchin blends with the kerbside smoker, while women clothed from “neck to heel” mingle amongst bowlers and panamas; these and others are all frozen in time, juxtaposed in a wedge of Victorian high rise. Solicitors, tobacconists and jewellers signs jostle the eye, while curtains in the windows of the Occidental Hotel hang limply in the heat. No animal or human crossed the road during the breathless instant when Vulcan Lane was recorded for posterity.
From William Main’s book Auckland Through a Victorian Lens, Millwood Press, 1977
