Helen, by Frank

Exploring the lives of New Zealand author Helen Shaw and her husband, photographer Frank Hofmann, alongside their complementary artistic projects.

By Gabrielle McClellanMarch 27, 2026

• Art & Architecture

• Fiction

IN THE MUSEUM OF New Zealand’s photography collection, there is a photo from 1941 of a family seated on an outdoor patio in Christchurch. Nina Spiro, my great-great-aunt, lounges on a lawn chair under an umbrella. In another photo, my grandfather’s cousin Michael beams at something off camera, Nina smiling at him from the side.

The photographer is Frank Hofmann, a Jewish émigré from Prague who arrived in New Zealand a year prior. Among the photographs in Hofmann’s collections are portraits of the Strauss and Spiro families, glimpses into patio scenes of their gatherings and the rugged but comely facades of cottage homes in Christchurch. In sunlit garden scenes, men wear suits and smile tentatively, and women don floral dresses and beam, like the children, toward the camera. Nina is the one with pinned blonde hair, leaning forward, across the table from Diana Strauss, who leans forward with hair hidden under a hat. A flagpole in the corner of the yard rises above the fence and disappears beyond the frame.

Such images capture a bucolic suburbia, incongruous with the circumstances of the subjects’ and the photographer’s arrival in New Zealand. The Strauss and Spiro families, German-born Jews, fled Europe in 1939. But the New Zealand government did not accept Jews under refugee status; their entrance was permitted on the same basis as other emigrants, dependent on their employment. When the Spiros and Strausses arrived in Christchurch, they became part of a nascent Jewish community, two families among the 1,100 Jews that would eventually settle in New Zealand after fleeing Europe.

Frank Hofmann, among this comparatively small community of Jewish refugees, fled Czechoslovakia first to England, then to New Zealand. Born František Simon Hofmann, he received his first camera on a trip to Venice, Italy, with his mother as a teenager. His early works capture a fascination with urban angles and subjects. Among his earlier works is Diving Tower, Prague, taken in 1936 at a swimming club, where the young photographer stands beneath a diving tower, capturing the distant, hovering figure of a female diver meters above, the angle hallowing her stance far above the pool deck. Her arms are outstretched, cross-like, as she prepares to leap from the board. Her small, rigid figure, perched far above Hofmann and the waters below, casts a weary but anticipatory veil over the photograph; she is about to leap into unseen depths. Hofmann seems to enjoy distance from his subjects: in Kampa Steps, Prague (1938), he stands on the second or third story of a building, overlooking figures in the street below, the tops of their hats becoming the sharp focal points in an otherwise isolating image.

Shortly after arriving in Christchurch, Hofmann met Helen Shaw. Shaw was a writer nearly four years his senior; after marrying quickly, the two settled in Auckland. Where the tensile, unsettling imagination in Hofmann’s photographs imparts a sense of alienation, Shaw’s fiction fixes on hidden things, exposing her characters’ hopelessness and isolation. The subjects of Shaw’s short fiction, in a sense, echo the domestic calm that distinguishes the photos of the Spiro and Strauss families from Hofmann’s other photographs. Shaw writes about people and their relationship to family and land, and by extension their antagonism to modernity—or modernity’s antagonism toward them. What Shaw and Hofmann share in their work is a kind of estrangement, beholding the world at odd, teetering angles.

Together, Shaw and Hofmann became a cultural force in their small Auckland community. Hofmann enjoyed success with galleries both in New Zealand and around the world, and now his works are enjoying a renewal. In November 2025, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa curated an exhibition on 175 years of New Zealand photography, including Hofmann’s work. Shaw’s fiction, however, remains out of print; her short story and poetry collections were published in the 1970s and 1980s just before her death in 1985. She spent her life publishing in small literary magazines and hosting soirees with other local artists and writers, Te Ara – The Encyclopedia of New Zealand notes that “Frank’s wife […] gave generously of her time.”

A literary critic in the 1990s identified Shaw as writing in a “provincial” mode, a slightly patronizing if not honestly intended remark. Her work is about rural people, and she pays exceptional attention to the old and feisty, the young and earnest, insisting that we remain unjaded. In her own life, she described herself as a “romantic with a powerful belief in the romantic ideal.” Where Hofmann’s photographs of destruction and bizarre, industrialized scenes are sharp and commanding, Shaw’s fiction focuses on the individual. Her prose, while attending to realism in its detail and syntax, is existential. “Even among friends I feel a stranger,” she writes in a diary entry. “I am forgetting how to speak their language and alas so few of them speak mine.” From the outside, her life appears in a very particular way: limited to a sparsely populated Auckland, and to books and writing. She came from an isolated and tumultuous childhood in Timaru and devoted herself to Virginia Woolf at a young age. Meanwhile, the New Zealand government’s biography of Shaw cites a fascination with mysticism and Jungian philosophy—she spent much of her life shut up in the house, unable or refusing to drive, preferring curtains closed.

But rather than this closed-off image reflected by others—including her husband—her fiction reveals a deep commitment to the sublime. Her characters have intimate but challenging relationships to the land, their families, and the legacies of colonialism; houses and landscapes are at times claustrophobic, becoming characters in themselves. The early days of her career coincide with the forging of a uniquely place-rooted style among New Zealand writers, one described by critic Lawrence Jones as the “Provincial” period. Provincial writing, to Jones, protests modernity and promotes a midcentury New Zealand way of life. Shaw, however, does not write within the provincial genre, but rather in opposition to provinciality as a limiting worldview; her characters, thrust into a provincial New Zealand, are in search of greater meaning. In his dissertation on her work and life, scholar Tom Shoebridge notes Shaw’s increasing “hopes for publication” in the 1960s. Provincialism, as he describes it, is both a private, introspective way of writing and way of life; Shaw retreats from the world to write about others who retreat as well.

But neither Jones’s nor Shoebridge’s definition of provincialism captures Shaw’s writing and her legacy. Nor does either definition attend to the more pervasive but perhaps obvious reason she, like many female writers, is overlooked in literary history: the subject matter of her work is too feminine. Writing about other people in their homes, their hopes and fears, is a feminized task and thus deemed trivial. So, too, is this task opposed to the realist, man-versus-nature and man-versus-society fiction of Shaw’s contemporaries, whom Shoebridge describes as writing in a “masculinist” tradition. But by tending to women’s interiority, whether through her characters’ thoughts, diary entries, or conversations, Shaw reveals that conventional, parochial femininity is the last thing we should expect from her characters.

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“Praise the Lord, Wilson,” the first piece in The Gypsies and Other Stories (1978) and among the first stories Shaw published, follows the waspish but intrepid Miss Barclay, an old woman who, after inheriting a plot of land from her father, accidentally sells it to a young man named Wilson. On this plot of land is a forest of poplar trees, and only after selling does Miss Barclay discover Wilson’s immediate plans to cut down the grove. Wilson “quickly got rid of a kowhai and an oak,” she observes, then continues his destruction on the forest; Miss Barclay, dauntless and slightly berserk, sets about her campaign of rifle-toting threats to Wilson from her side of the property. After repeatedly commanding him to “repent,” she aims her gun to the heavens, crying out “Praise the Lord, Wilson!” over and over again.

Miss Barclay is a character, a crack, and the source of our schadenfreude, but she is also defending the land. Circling this caricature is a story gruff and teeming with rage. A batty woman, herself an inflection of land dispossessed, totes a rifle on her shoulder and shouts up at the heavens. We may anticipate the firing of Miss Barclay’s first shot; the second and third jolt us. “Pa was a crack shot, Wilson,” she cries at her neighbor, firing her gun straight into the sky. The very foliage she is protecting—trees planted ages before her birth, and perhaps her father’s as well—becomes a source of anxiety, as we, too, await their fate.

Yet tenderness lies beneath the story’s surface. The withering Miss Barclay cares for her younger sister, a woman dropped on concrete at birth and unable to function alone. This sensitivity and warmth surfaces when Wilson’s young daughter, Polly, sneaks inside the Barclay house, where, after happening upon the chairbound sister, she receives a bounty of sugar cubes from Miss Barclay. Whether Miss Barclay hides her sister out of shame or compassion remains unresolved. But Miss Barclay’s positioning—a wild, gun-toting woman who is also a responsible caregiver—presents the broader contradiction at the heart of Shaw’s fiction and the way her writing is miscategorized: writing about women is not strictly “feminine,” nor are masculinity and femininity fundamentally intractable.

Shaw’s characters resist the external forces—modernity, social expectations, gender roles—that undermine their lifestyles. If provincialism is a devotion to a rural, conservative way of life, then her characters, rather than operating in a strictly provincial genre, reflect different forms of resistance against conformity. This resistance, however, often results in hopelessness, which pervades many of her stories. In “The Mourners,” the illegitimate Lucinda Mather is taken in by Ephraim, who fathered Lucinda with a woman out of wedlock but pretends to be her uncle after she is abandoned as a teenager. Lucinda then moves in with Ephraim and his two unmarried sisters, both sanctimonious and disapproving. To Lucinda, or Cindy, living “with those two proud women in the big, gloomy, two-storied house […] would be like living with death,” and indeed she is not far from the truth. Stowed away in an attic like an old trunk, she is told she must always “obey [her aunts’] instructions.” Such instructions include bathing in a chemise, polishing the silver, and never stating out loud that Ephraim is her real father.

“The Mourners” offers little hope, however, for the triumph of Cindy’s rebellious spirit; crushed by her cruel aunts repeatedly and abandoned by her father, Cindy must continue living in the house, which is like living with death. While her little rebellions—refusing to polish the silver or wearing a “revealing” dress—never abate, Shaw doesn’t hint at a future escape. But Cindy is steadfast, quiet but not weak. Timidity, so often affixed to femininity and female characters, is nowhere to be seen in Shaw’s fiction.

Departing, as ever, from the tradition of provincial, local literature, Shaw’s characters are devoted to their own singular experiences. An existential mood—what begins as near-parody and evolves into a quiet but necessary way of life—evolves over the course of the stories in The Gypsies. Each character comes to understand their place in the world as a small part of a much larger whole, whether that is within households, communities, or nature itself. Indeed, this smallness complements the hopelessness present in many of the stories: if we ourselves are insignificant, then so, too, are our perceived failures and shortcomings.

In the middle of Shaw’s collection is “The Samovar,” the story of orphaned teenage runaway Natasha. Natasha’s yearnings for escape and true connection are kept tidy and clear in a diary: “No one understands what it feels like not to belong to anyone.” At times, the formal interjections of the diary are too on the nose, making explicit the sentiments that pervade the setting: Natasha arrives in a coed boardinghouse far from home, where she must contemplate her next moves. In her room there, a locked door leads to the adjoining room, in which an odd-looking young antique dealer named Victor is staying. Natasha and her neighbor become friends and exchange stories. He confesses that he is “simply fascinated by things that have gone out of fashion,” and together their dialogue, full of lucid reflection, mirrors the relationship that characters in previous stories shared, in which material possessions or the land itself indicates a lost way of life. But Natasha’s character is distinct in that she is not a caricature. Rather, she is earnest, searching for a deeper connection with the world, yet uncertain, if slightly ashamed, of her desire for something more.

Natasha’s hope for a better life, for love, is rapidly crushed when Victor disappears. “I have come away from my family,” Natasha writes in her diary. “Here there will be a chance to live, to be myself.” In many ways, Natasha’s diary reads like Shaw’s personal treatise at the conclusion of the collection, titled “Short Stories: An Essay.” “I have worked largely in isolation,” writes Shaw. Her solitude and commitment to writing make for a lonely but fructifying affair. On her younger self, she remarks, “I saw myself as a drop in an ocean rather than an ocean in myself.” Natasha, too, seems to see herself as a drop in an ocean. In search of a different life, she suffers from the feeling of being “detached, not a real part of the life the others are enjoying.”

Perhaps Shaw’s cause of hopelessness stems from a life of necessary isolation. In her personal essay, she includes an intimate yet brief description of her cause for writing, and the challenge, but also necessity, of routine for craft. She quotes from her own diary, including an entry made following the completion of her first collection, written when she was a young teacher living in Christchurch. “Interesting that the typewriter acted as a control for any sort of rambling or any unnecessary details,” Shaw writes. This attention to essentiality—a writer’s determination to include only the necessary words—also seems metaphorical for the ways in which her characters view the world: once we find meaning, the essential parts of life fall into place.

The land in many of Shaw’s stories is a symbol of a life that must be saved, as is the case for Miss Barclay and for another character, Mrs. Brockieburn, from “Singeing the Cockerel.” But this commitment extends to a fundamentally colonial desire. Existing near the edges of Shaw’s stories, at times flung into the open and placed under spotlight, are the Māori people, living on the very land from which Shaw’s characters plunder. In “Praise the Lord, Wilson,” Miss Barclay’s house is decorated with “Maori spears and a tiger skin complete with glass eyes and a scarlet throat,” casting her mania for land protection in a hypocritical light; she herself is a thief, part of the colonial project. In “A Revival,” the aging Mrs. Anstey imagines her aunt Anne “standing on the verandah of her colonial home watching hordes of Maoris streaming up the harbour.” The distance between Anne and the Māori is akin to the distance between Shaw and coloniality: she observes, and perhaps complies with, violent displacement.

The heart of Shaw’s stories, then, exists in the collision of present and past, native and colonized land, true solitude and false company. A story, for Shaw, happens “when the fight between the intellect and the dream subsides” and she may concentrate on the characters at hand.

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Where Shaw positions people as small but complex creatures in a mercurial world, Hofmann focuses on the absurdity and decay caused by humankind itself. In a sense, his work reflects the other side of what Shaw critiques in her fiction: his photographs capture material destruction and a humanity devoid of connection, people separated from the camera or from one another. In Caducity (1955), one of a select few photographs taken by Hofmann at eye level, a reception room full of rubble stands in the aftermath of some unspoken event, likely a bombing. Bricks and blocks of crumbling cement cover the floor, and the lines of shredded wall, jagged wires, and broken pipes form the borders of the room. In the center, however, is a fireplace largely untouched. On the wall above the fireplace is an Art Deco painting of a drummer, a cellist, and a pianist, the three band members depicted in loose, sketch-like positions, lines of sheet music swirling around their arms. The art is rendered directly onto the wall in a mirage-like series; art is the lone survivor following destruction.

In Hofmann’s photographs, his fascination with urban settings, with man-made creation and chaos, creates a sense of panic and paralysis whereby the destruction prompts our desperation to act, to face the consequences of what we have done, while it also immobilizes us. In this frozen state, we are isolated. The isolation in Shaw’s fiction, however, is not rooted in such materiality. Shaw is interested in the inability to reconcile oneself with the world. Such estrangement is not a punishment but a welcome relief: she and her characters know, or come to realize, that they are drops in an ocean.

When Natasha meets Victor at the boardinghouse for the first time, she begins revealing her life to him in small, insistent bursts. These revelations strike us as desperate, perhaps the mark of an ingenue, but as Natasha says more, we learn that she is not so silly or naive: she is in search of new life and in search of love. We laugh at these characters at our peril, Shaw warns us. If we ignore the hidden inner worlds of others, if we leave a version of ourselves unacknowledged or repressed, we will suffer. Natasha’s romanticism is her way of challenging social expectations, and indeed, many of Shaw’s characters challenge their circumstances in such ways: Miss Barclay is just the first of many women raging against modernity. What Miss Barclay and Natasha share—what joins their idealism and disobedience—is protest. Shaw does not believe in sitting still and letting life pass one by.

I discovered Shaw through her husband’s work. His photographs of the Strauss and Spiro families stand apart from the abstraction and uneasiness that marks his other works, capturing a halcyon image of family life. These portraits are, if anything, more like Shaw’s subject matter, whereby individuals are placed in their homes, off guard. Rather than patio scenes, Hofmann favors objects like scissors, clothing lines, light bulbs, and other sharply shadowed items as his subjects, turning everyday miscellany into scenes of disquiet. Domestic happiness, then, is at odds with his severe style.

Even among his other portraiture, the camera is angled to render the viewer alien to the human subject: a photograph of Lili Kraus is turned upside down in its display, giving us the sensation of dangling over her like a crane. One of Hofmann’s highlighted photographs in the 2025 Te Papa exhibition is a spacious, sharply contrasting image of a studio, with models and photographers setting up their own scenes. Shadows coat half of the image, the other half illuminated by ruthless studio lights.

The portraits of the Spiro and Strauss families are soft in comparison. But these portraits, like the stories in The Gypsies, are not merely images of domestic happiness. The Spiro and Strauss families’ escape from Nazism is not revealed in these photographs. Their circumstances are also hidden by the idyllic patio scene captured by Hofmann; before arriving here, where they gather in the sun in their summer dresses and blazers, they were forced to flee the opposite corner of the earth. They are now among the first Jews in their community. Though this is Hofmann’s photograph of my distant aunt and cousins, I can’t help but perceive Shaw’s influence. Her characters are expelled from their societies, outcasts who must confront a profound loneliness. Each story, like the photographs of the Spiros and Strausses, mimics the idea of a quiet life in New Zealand, for beneath the surface—and sometimes bubbling over—lies turmoil and devastation.

Eleven years after they were married, Hofmann photographed Shaw in their home in Remuera, New Zealand. She stands at the end of a dark hall, one arm folded across her abdomen, the other upright with a cigarette propped between fingers. Her hair makes a sweeping cape around her face as she stares, unsmiling, at the camera down the hall. The title of the photograph is simply listed as “Helen Shaw by Frank Hofmann,” capturing in a spare phrase the nature of our understanding of Shaw’s work, much of which was not published until her final years of life. Hofmann’s photographs of the Spiro and Strauss families betray an unkempt domesticity, one removed from his usual subject matter. In these photographs we are thrown into family life, into palpable joy—while Shaw, withholding expression, looms at the end of a dark hall, watching.

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Featured image: Cover of Helen Shaw’s The Gypsies and Other Stories, 1978.