Missing pieces: Help us identify photographs in our collection

Posted: 20 June 2016

The Whakatāne Museum is hoping the community will help to fill in the missing pieces of many puzzles that are in the Museum’s photographic collection, which contains over 600,000 images dating from 1860 to the present. Whakatāne District Council Museum and Arts Team Leader Hamish Pettengell says one way the community can assist the Museum is by helping to identify the people and places in the photos held in the collection, and the Museum is looking to the internet and social media to help.

“We have some incredible images depicting the life and times that have shaped our District,” he says. “What we’re missing are the details about who these people are, and where they’re from. There will be people in our community who will recognise these faces and can shed some light on their identity, and so we are going to be posting a selection to our Facebook page in the coming weeks and asking the public to let us know if they can help.”

Mr Pettengell says people may recognise family members, or even just family likenesses, and he invites younger people to help senior friends and family members to get involved by showing them the images on the Museum’s Facebook page and seeing if they can shed any light on the photos.

You can also email us on museum@whakatane.govt.nz for any information or suggestions about the selected images.

Help supply information on photos from our collection

We need more information about the photos below. If you can help us out with a specific photo, click or tap it to leave a comment on our Facebook page.

Can you identify any of the people in the photo?

While many of the images are hard to place geographically, this week's picture appears to have been taken at Opihi, looking back towards the Whakatāne escarpment.