Today, more than ever, memorials are under scrutiny. In his new photobook, A Vocabulary, Bruce Connew brings together hundreds of photographs he’s taken of Pākehā memorials and gravestones from the New Zealand Wars, which frame the Wars from the viewpoint of the colonists. His collection also includes a few images of pou whakamaumahara—commemorative poles erected by Māori in more recent times at New Zealand Wars battle sites.

A Vocabulary is a personal project. Connew is not offering a reference guide to Pākehā memorials. He doesn’t record their forms and inscriptions with any consistency. His approach is more subjective. He goes in close, focusing on details in the inscriptions—a few phrases and words here and there—highlighting their rhetoric, the ‘vocabulary’ of colonisation.

With Connew’s framings, we are always aware that we are looking at the memorials through his eyes, and through the epic task he has set himself—visiting and photographing myriad sites in a protracted act of witnessing. Connew has a complex relation to his material. While he exposes bad language, he also revels in the antique lettering styles and the textures of stone—his images are beautiful and sad.

Precisely sequenced and paced, his quotes coalesce into a ‘stuttering collective poem’, as John Hurrell put it—a counter text made by recycling fragments of the colonial text. For instance, he turns the line ‘They live in memory by their deeds’ against its intended positive meaning.

The book also contains ‘He Mōteatea: “The Lament”’, a rich text by Māori art historian Rangihīroa Panoho. Connew invited him to contribute to the book without showing him the photographs, and Connew didn’t read Panoho’s text until the book was printed. It’s a unique meeting of minds, of voices. Panoho argues against tearing down monuments, preferring they be left ‘as intended … as a testimony to the past’. Adding, ‘How else will New Zealanders learn from the mistakes of the ancestors?’

With more than 600 pages and clothbound, A Vocabulary has a bible-like girth—a literal weight to match the symbolic weight of its subject matter. Precisely designed by Connew and typographer Catherine Griffiths, it was lovingly published in a short run—just 325 copies—by Vapour Momenta Books.