Vintage NZ photos in the US up for auction

Over a million vintage New Zealand photographs almost ended up in landfill after being sent to the US to be digitised in 2013.

Among the photos are images of the Rainbow Warrior sinking, Sir Edmund Hillary's ascent of Mt Everest and Napier in aftermath of the 1931 Earthquake. Some photos date back as early as 1840.

It's a rich visual archive of Aotearoa but are now available for auction on the open market in New Zealand.

Daniel Miller saved the photos from being destroyed, and tells Jesse Mulligan about his desire for them to be returned to their homeland.

The photographs were sent over to America to be digitised by Fairfax Media in 2013, he says.

“They sent them to a guy who said he could digitize them in the US. And shortly after they arrived in the US that company went bankrupt, they had all kinds of fraud problems.”

The archive ended up being owned by a bank which had loaned money to the owner of the bankrupt company.

The bank got in touch with Miller and after some lengthy negotiations, he bought them.

The archive he purchased was eye-bleeding, he says.

“It's been kind of a disaster. When I first acquired it I thought, okay, it's gonna be fairly well organised. It just wasn't. So, I had to hire a couple of archivists.

“We spent about three and a half years hand sorting these photos one at a time. So, it's like, oh OK here's a rugby union player. Here's a rugby league player. Oh, here's an attorney. Oh, here's an Australian politician. Oh, there's a French person, what's that doing in here?

“So, it took an enormous amount of time to try to make some sense out of this.”

They’ve held 15 auctions in New Zealand so far, Miller says.

“We're running these between $100 and about $500 apiece what we're expecting, they're gonna sell for.

“These are the actual historical artefacts, these are the actual pieces that were used to make the newspapers back in the day.”

Fairfax had the opportunity to buy the pictures back, he says.

“Nobody seems to really know what the reason is why they didn't do it.

“Either they didn't have the money to buy them back. Or they just didn't know where to put them. Or they thought, that's the last thing we want right now is more stuff.

“You're talking about an enormous collection, I mean, our warehouse is about 6000 square feet.”

They are now stored in a climate-controlled environment, he says.

“The storage these things were in before, was abysmal. Some of the storage I've seen in New Zealand with these photos were at, was absolutely terrible and damage, some photographs through bad storage.”

If you buy one however, you own the artefact but not he copyright, he says.

“We don't own the copyright, we don't sell the copyright.”