A picture's worth a thousand words

Posted on 21 December 2011 by Thomasin

It's our last week of work here at DigitalNZ headquarters, and we're busy tying up loose ends and eating way too much chocolate.  We thought we'd make our last blogpost of 2011 a fun romp through some of the team's favourite images in DigitalNZ. 

Woman modelling Daphne lingerie

Right now, this has to be my favourite image. A lingerie model and a pole-dancing monkey puppet? I don't even know where to begin.

Pokeno the Dog 

Fi has a soft spot for Pokeno: "He kicked off my librarian hunting instinct for the first time in a while. Why would the Victoria and Albert Museum have an an engraving of a wee dog named after a small North Waikato NZ settlement? I had to know. So by searching DigitalNZ I found that Pokeno was the site of the Queen's Redoubt, an important military base during the New Zealand Wars. The Queen's Redoubt was built by the 50th Regiment that Pokeno belonged to. I also found this wee snippet in PapersPast (Otago Daily Times , Issue 4150, 7 June 1875 ) that I think refers to that engraving:

"...Another Waikato hero had his portrait engraved in the Graphic of the 3rd April. This was Pokeno; the- pet dog of the 50th Regiment, who attached himself to that corps in 1864, followed his- masters throughout the campaign of that and the succeeding year, and has remained faithful to them throughout their numerous-.wanderings since then."

I also discovered that military mascots have quite a long tradition. So I wonder if Pokeno was New Zealand's first one? Maybe someone out there knows?

Benson and Hedges Fashion Design Awards 

This is Chris's favourite image. When asked for his reason for liking it so much, he said, "What's not to love? Lauren of Arabia hangs out with Starman and local Wiccan." Fair enough!

Steve Goodfellow and Daniel Charles lean into the gale 

This probably isn't Dan's "favourite image", but we think it's pretty cool because it's an image of Dan when he was 10 years old (he's on the left). Unbelievably, this photo was taken by Ross Giblin, the same Dominion Post photographer who also took the above photograph of the fashion design students 26 years earlier. Cool!

A search for the 'unidentified'

When searching DigitalNZ, a few of us like to search for images of people that include the term 'unidentified'.  As a former cataloguer, I was interested to know how many images contained people who could not be identified.  There are thousands.  Then my curiosity turned to the content of the images.  I found myself wanting to talk directly to the people in the photos.  Who are you?  Where are you from?  What is your story?   

Unidentified woman sitting on cow

Unidentified spaniel  

We hang out on DigitalNZ everyday and have heaps of favourite images.  These are just a small selection. We'd love to know what your favourites are. So leave a comment and share them with us.  

Happy Holidays, and we'll see you in 2012!

Comments

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Great collection of images on your site!

Thanks Zelda, we're very proud of all the amazing New Zealand content contributed by our wonderful contributing organisations, in New Zealand and abroad: http://digitalnz.org/partners/current-content-contributors Chelsea, DigitalNZ Community Manager

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