George Moodie And Thomas Muir

Place: Dunedin

Born: 1868

Death: 1916

Biography:

Muir & Moodie was a photography studio founded in 1868 in Dunedin, New Zealand by Alfred Burton and his brothers Walter, John, and Oliver. Alfred Burton was a member of the Burton Brothers photography studio, which was one of the most important nineteenth-century photographic studios in New Zealand. In 1866, Walter Burton founded the Grand Photographic Saloon and Gallery in Princes Street, Dunedin. Alfred Burton joined his brother in the venture in 1868, and the two brothers formed a business partnership under the name Burton Brothers. Walter concentrated on portraiture in Dunedin, while Alfred travelled throughout the country to take landscape photographs. The firm proved a major success, providing both a studio portraiture service for the settlers and images of New Zealand landscapes and scenes of ethnographic interest including Maori portraiture, which were in high demand by tourists and travellers to New Zealand and by other collectors around the world. In 1877, due to personal differences caused by Walter's heavy drinking, Alfred formed a business partnership with George Moodie and Thomas Muir under the name Muir & Moodie. Walter set up an independent studio. In 1880, Walter committed suicide, and John, saddened, returned to England. Alfred Burton continued to business with Moodie and Muir as his partners until retiring in 1898. Moodie and Muir continued to run the firm under the same name until its eventual closure in 1916. Alfred Burton, in particular, is considered one of 19th-century New Zealand's most notable photographers, and his series of images of Maori in the southwestern North island is of major significance. This series, 'Through the King Country with a camera: a photographers diary', was published in the Otago Daily Times in 1885. His spectacular images of Fiordland were in part responsible for the New Zealand Government naming the region as a National Park. During the 1880s Alfred travelled extensively through the South Pacific, photographing scenes of village life in Samoa, Fiji, and Tonga. He also produced a series of images of the devastation caused by the 1886 eruption of Mount Tarawera, rephotographing locations which he had previously visited some years before the eruption.