Based
on text from the original book: Shades of Light:
Photography and Australia 1839-1988
Gael Newton, 1988 Australian National Gallery
Chapter 8 Amateurs & the Portrait & Views Trade in the 1890s – 1920s
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The
last generation
The
amateur Pictorialists were not alone in introducing fashionable
soft-focus
effects to their portraits, some professionals
also
responded. H.Walter Barnett (1862—1934) was born in
Melbourne and apprenticed to Stewart’s, a Melbourne portrait
studio in 1875, where he formed a lifetime friendship with
Tom Roberts,
who was working there as a studio assistant. Barnett was trained
as a camera operator and reputedly never engaged in the printing
side of the work. He established a studio with a partner, Riis,
in Hobart in 1880—1882 then gained experience in overseas
studios before setting up the Falk studio in Sydney in 1885.
He travelled frequently to keep up with new techniques and
Falk studio was able to monopolise society and theatre portraiture.
In 1898 Barnett moved to London where he established a fashionable
studio in Hyde Park. By May 1899 he became the first and only
Australian to be elected to The Linked Ring Brotherhood(1).
Barnett’s
1892 portrait of Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales,
shows some of the new softness used to dramatic
effect. Barnett, if not a printer, as photohistorian Jack
Cato claims(2) had a flair for male portraiture in addition
to his
great success as a society portraitist in London. He moved
to Dieppe, France, in 1916 where he continued making portraits,
including a very fine series of the characters around the
town, such as The old locksmith. These exploited the effective
use
of lighting evident in his 1890s work(3).
Professional
photographers in the l880s and l890s began to respond to the
more elaborate
pictures, particularly the
genre tableaux
being shown at the amateur exhibitions. J. Brooks Thornley
(w.1898-1900)
who was camera operator for Barnett at Falk Studio in Sydney,
produced several genre pieces with themes such as “Jealousy”(4).
James
Taylor (1846-1917) of Adelaide, sold a number of
narrative tableaux featuring staged battles between whites
and Aboriginals, as well as a studio tableau showing
Constables Willshire
and Wurmbrand with native police in the camp at Alice Springs This
image commemorated the capture in 1887, of some Aboriginals
by these constables. The Port Augusta Despatch of 24 January
1888 described Taylor’s tableau as a ‘picturesque
cabinet' which transcended its ‘predecessors in
artistic finish and intrinsic interest’. The truth
of the events depicted depended on the viewpoint of the
spectator,
missionaries
for example, regarded Willshire as a ruthless murderer(5).
Commissioned
series of photographs of industrial projects also acquired
an extra dimension of glamour and drama.
J. Duncan
Pierce (w.1887) made a series of views of the BHP
plant in 1887(6) that
included ambitious underground shots of the miners
at work. Electric lighting and flash powder made low-light
subjects
possible around
the turn of the century, and many leading studios tackled
interior scenes.
Theatre
companies were a particularly popular subject for photographers
taking flashlight portraits,
adding
to the
already considerable
market for portraits of theatrical performers, the ‘pop
stars’ of their day. Barnett specialised in
theatrical personalities.
The
Queensland Railways Department also commissioned
an extensive series of photographs, covering the
rebuilding of the Indooroopilly
Bridge in 1893. The photographs were possibly taken
by Government Photographer CES Fryer (w.c. 1880s-1900)(7). The mammoth plate albumen prints are very rich
and give more prominence
to the workers than is common in such official
work. This may have
been due to the unusual nature of some of their
activities for which they used diving suits.
There
were probably several hundred amateur photographers
in the 1890s associated with the various societies
and others who were unaffiliated and were interested
chiefly
in creating
chronicles
of their families. Although thousands of women
were employed in the mass production of portraits
in the
city studios,
the
surviving bodies of amateur work before the early
twentieth century are predominantly by men(8).
Photographic
societies around the country organised exhibitions so that
amateurs could have the opportunity
of displaying
their work. In 1895 members of the South Australian
Photographic Society were represented in the
South Australian Chamber
of
Manufacturers
Exhibition of Art and Industry. This show was
significant for its mixed hanging of photographs and traditional
works of art.
One exhibitor of prints and stereographs was
H.H.
Tilbrook (1848-1937),
founder of the Northern Argus newspaper in South
Australia. Tilbrook was not allied with the ‘fuzzy
wuzzies’ of the
turn of the century but his late platinotype
prints had a distinctive style(9).
Judge
Ernest Docker (1839-1923), President of the New
South Wales Photographic Society from 1894-1907,
(whose father had experimented with the calotype
in 1850) had reported on
photography in Australia to the British Journal
of Photography in the 1870s.
He found his forte as a stereophotographer
from the 1890s, making hundreds of views on
his excursions
and travels(10).
In
Queensland, Walter Hume (1840-1921)
recorded his family and activities on their
Darling Downs property(11). While
in Sydney, A.W.Allen (1862-1941)
had also begun his long photographic reportage
of his family. His
series of albums dating from 1899 through
to the 1920s are one of the earliest to
have the flavour
of
the informal ‘snapshot’ without
the poor quality that often limits the
appeals of family photographs(12).
In
Tasmania the leading amateurs in the
Northern Tasmanian Society were Frank
Styant Browne
(1854-1938) and A.Harold Masters
(1874-1951), who were both long-serving
members. Browne was a chemist and followed
the developments of overseas Pictorialists
without adopting the soft-focus or overt
stylisation of their
examples(13). He
was particularly interested in technical
advances and with Masters,
an architect and teacher, made the first
X-ray photographs in Tasmania in 1896
and in 1897 Styant Browne
was
one of the earliest demonstrators of
colour photography in Australia(14).
The
professional studio photographers
may have viewed the massive democratisation
of photography
in the
1890s with
disdain but
they would hardly have felt there was
any
competition. The studios were turning
out even more portraits
and views than
ever for
the same reasons as prompted the growth
in amateur output; the dry plate, the
concentration of people
in the cities,
and the
opening up of a views trade associated
with
tourism. Each major city had a few
studios providing the
bulk of views
from their
state but the best known of the new
generation of masters of the genre at the turn of
the century were;
J.W.Beattie in
Tasmania, and Charles Kerry and Henry
King of Sydney(15). Born within a few
years of each other in the late 1850s,
their careers began in the late 1880s,
paralleling
the growth
of Pictorialism, then
dwindled by the First World War which
brought an end to
the views trade.
Scottish-born
John Beattie (1859-1930) arrived in
Tasmania with his parents in 1878(16). The dry plate arrived at the same
time and by 1879 Beattie was on an
expedition to Lake St Clair taking
dry plate views, the first of the
region and some of
the earliest in Australia(17).
He
joined the Anson Brothers studio, established in 1878 when
Henry,
Richard
and Joshua
Anson bought out
Samuel
Clifford’s
studio in Hobart. Beattie in turn
bought out the Ansons in 1891.
He was dedicated both to the history
of Tasmania and to the promotion
of its scenic wonders. Beattie
trekked
into regions which had not been
photographed, or were unlikely
to be visited by
tourists
due to the ruggedness of the terrain,
bringing back images which created
a public image of the island’s
great wilderness beauty. After
1896 Beattie had the status of
an official
photographer
to the Tasmanian Government and
was a member of the Tourist Association,
producing a number of illustrated
guides to the
country.
He
was most comfortable with direct
landscape photography, with a
good range of tone
and simple compositions.
He avoided the
genre tableaux that animated
many of Caires photographs and the mythologies
of the
bushmen which they
supported. Despite
his
government activities Beattie,
like Caire, was not just in the
business
of making
views. In
1907 Beattie
declared
the
strip
of land reserved on either side
of the Gordon River ‘totally
inadequate to protect the river
... all the hillsides immediately
fronting the river should be
reserved’(18). The Tasmanian Wilderness Society
in the 1980s shares this view
and uses photography
as a vehicle to promote the preservation
of the environment.
Charles
Kerry (1858-1928) was born on his father’s sheep
station near Cooma, in the Monaro uplands, close to the Australian
alpine region of Mount Kosciusko. This pastoral background may
account for the specialty which his Sydney studio later developed
in views of such properties, sheep shearing and artesian bores.
He had a lifelong interest in prospecting and eventually retired
in 1911 to take up tin mining in Malaysia. A keen sportsman,
Kerry was active in the establishment of Mount Kosciusko as a
winter sports centre(19).
Originally
intending to be a surveyor, Charles Kerry joined A.H.Lamartine’s
studio in Sydney as an apprentice in 1875 and established his
own studio in 1884. The height of the studio’s output was
during the 1890s when, using a number of travelling photographers,
Kerry provided the rural properties with portraits and views
and in turn sold pastoral images to the city folk. He was quick
to exploit the postcard extension of the views trade, which boomed
just after the turn of the century. By 1903 his firm had a stock
of 50,000 postcards which ensured their monopoly of the local
market(20).
Kerry
left the social and glamour portraits and the luxury prints to
his contemporary rivals at Falk studio, and concentrated on a
kind of pioneer photojournalism, sending his staff to photograph
anything of topical interest and specialising in having the first
prints available to the public in that pre-television era. One
of the most talented of his field operators was George Bell (w.1887-c.1920)
who had trained as a surveyor, been a photographer for the New
South Wales Government expedition on board the Victory
to New Guinea in 1887, and done some press photography before
joining Kerry and Co in 1890. He left to join the Sydney Mail
in 1900 as the first generation of the magazine’s
in-house press photographers(21).
Harold
Bradley (1875-1953) and Wilhelm van der Velden (1877-1954)
were Kerry’s later chief field photographers(22). Wilhelm
van der Velden made a number of panoramas, including one of the
arrival of the ‘Great White Fleet’ of American war
ships in 1908. Kerry had imported a Cirkut panoramic camera for
such work(23).
Grand
panoramic views in one piece had already been made of Sydney
in 1904 by the American photographer, Melvin
Vaniman (c.1870-1912). Vaniman visited Australia and New
Zealand and worked also on commission from a shipping company
as an itinerant photographer specialising in panoramic views.
He imported
a Cirkut camera and a balloon that he used to make a 360 degree
view of Sydney from the North Shore in early 1904. He made numerous
other panoramas from conventional high structures that were printed
on platinum paper. Quite how he made a living from such luxurious
craftsmanship some panoramas were over a metre long, is not evident(24). Vaniman
died in his balloon the Akron in 1912 during an attempt to cross
the Atlantic. Panoramas remained popular until the 1920s, but
by then degenerated into rather hack works with little
of the
quality of the nineteenth and early twentieth century versions(25).
Henry
King (1855-1923), also of Sydney, was more like his
Melbourne contemporary, Nicholas Caire, than Charles Kerry, in
that he largely operated alone and on
a smaller scale than the latter’s pictorial conveyer belt. King, however,
was the poet of the city not the bush. Born in England he arrived in Australia
in 1857, with his family. After working for J.H.Newman’s studio, King
set up his own business in 1880 with William Slade, and finally from 1895 under
his own name. The subject matter of the views trade was determined by the interests
of the public and so King produced the same basic fare as Kerry, although he
did relatively little of the coverage of ‘news’ events in which
Kerry’s
studio specialised. King’s city and harbour pictures are more carefully
framed and printed than Kerry’s. He favoured a dark foreground, or dark
masses, to give extra drama. Both Kerry and King made extensive portraits of
the Aboriginal people that ranged from brutal direct records of physiognomy
to gentler images of mothers and children. From about the turn of the century
King
concentrated on outdoor work, including a series of shots by magnesium flash
of the Jenolan Caves(26).
The
older generation of views photographers were active almost to
the close of the trade at around the time of World War One, when
illustrated magazines
provided
cheaper views for the public and gave rise to a new breed of reportage and
documentary photographers.
The
major urban centres of the eastern states dominate this account,
but studios specialising in views existed in most
states. Their stories are still
largely
unresearched with the exception of Queensland(27) but they reflect the patterns
set in the biggest cities.
List
of illustrations used in the original publication (captions may
be abbreviated):
P.75:
H.Walter Barnett: Sie henry Parkes, 1892
P.76:
James Taylor: Mounted Constables Wiltshire and Wurmbrand, 1887
P.76:
J. Duncan Pierce: Miners at Bottom of Shaft, Broken Hill, 1887
P.77:
Qld railways (attr C.E.S.Fryer): Indrooropilly Bridge, 1895
P.77:
H.H.Tilbrook: The Monument, Spring Gulley, 1989
P.78:
H.H.Tilbrook: Pelican point, spoils of the ocean, nr Bungalow,
1895
P.79:
J.W.Beattie: Sunrise, Tasmania's Arch, Eagler Hawk Neck, c.1890
P.80-81:
Kerry & Co: Shearing Time, Burrawang Station, NSW c.1895
P.82-83:
Melvin Vaniman: Cnr Collins & Queen Sts, Melbourne 1904
P.83:
Henry King: Curator, Jenolan Caves, NSW c.1900