By Julia Bradshaw, Senior Curator Human History
The W A Kennedy Collection is a remarkable collection of around 22,000 lantern slides mostly relating to mountaineering and the outdoors. The images were collected by William Alexander Kennedy (1865–1950), a schoolteacher, mountaineer and traveller who made it his life’s work to encourage people to venture into the mountains.
In 1896, Kennedy was the first person to cycle to the Hermitage at Mount Cook Village and he made several first ascents in the area. Using both his own negatives and those of his companions, Kennedy began to build a collection that he used for innumerable slide shows and to help other mountaineers plan trips. By the 1920s Kennedy had a collection of thousands of lantern slides and these could be loaned by anyone who was a member of the Canterbury Mountaineering Club or New Zealand Alpine Club. The collection continued to grow as mountaineers visited Kennedy to recount their climbs and they felt honoured if Kennedy invited them to hand over a negative.
Along with Kennedy’s own photographs, the collection includes images taken by, to name a few, Jane Thomson, Charles Beken, W D Frazer, G E Mannering and his great friend Ebenezer Teichelmann.
See the Kennedy Collection on Collections Online.
This collection has been digitised thanks to the support of the New Zealand Lotteries Grant Board.
