The Mechanical Eye in Australia: Photography 1841–1900, was written by Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury and published in 1985. It is a definitive history of Australian 19th century photography. It covered the evolution of photographic techniques from the first daguerreotypes to the rise of personal cameras.
The authors were Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury, with assistance from Con Tanre. The book was published by Oxford University Press, Melbourne (1985). The book was a 270-page detailed record of 19th-century Australian photography, including biographical notes on photographers and the introduction of new technologies like cartes-de-visite It documents the era from the first known Australian photograph (1841) to 1900. Widely considered the standard reference work for 19th-century Australian photographic history, it includes a bibliography and extensive illustrations.
The book was recognized for its exhaustive cataloging of 19th-century photographers and its technical breakdown of early processes. It served as a primary reference for the daguerreotype era through documenting the arrival of the daguerreotype in Sydney in March 1841 aboard the French ship Justine, brought by Captain Augustin Lucas.
One of its most valuable features was a comprehensive directory of professional and amateur photographers working in the Australian colonies during the 19th century. The authors detailed the transition from silver-coated copper plates (daguerreotypes) to wet-plate collodion and eventually the gelatin dry-plate processes that paved the way for more portable photography. The book's was both a visual history and a technical manual. The book brought to notice rare images from state libraries and private collections, many of which at the time had not been published previously.
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