Introduction A Global Picture
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Australia delineated
In
1726 a marvellous tale of four voyages was published in London.
The book was Travels into
Several Remote Nations of the World...
By Lemuel Gulliver, first a Surgeon, then a Captain of Several
Ships. On the first of these voyages the island of Lilliput
is discovered at 30 degrees 2 minutes south latitude in a
region northwest of Van Diemen's Land. This island, renamed
Tasmania
in 1853, lies off the southeast tip of the Australian mainland.
The Lilliputians thus 'lived' on the eastern end of the Great
Australian Bight.
Gulliver's
Travels was in fact a satire by the Anglo-Irish author, Jonathan
Swift (1667-1745)(1).
He made his hero a cousin of the English explorer of the
Antipodes, William Dampier (1652-1715),
whose own books A New Voyage Round the World (1697)
and A
Voyage to New Holland (1703) had stimulated interest
in these mysterious
regions.
Terra
Australis had appeared on world maps as a sprawling mass
since the mid-sixteenth century. Various later explorers
charted
substantial parts of the west, north and southern coasts
of this land that was known after 1645 as New Holland.
It was
not until
1770, when Captain James Cook (1728-1779) navigated
the entire eastern coast that the true outline of the fifth
continent
became known in Europe(5).
Captain
Cook's three momentous voyages of scientific exploration into
the Pacific were undertaken
for the British Admiralty
between 1768-1779 and brought the Antipodean world
fully into European consciousness(3). His
unveiling of Australia as
a geographic entity
(though not circumnavigated until 1803) substantially
completed the map of the world. In European eyes it was the
last
continental prize, only the polar regions remained as
new-world frontiers.
In
creating Gulliver's Travels, Swift drew on the explorations
of his contemporaries and recent
scientific and technological
developments, including refinements to the telescope
and microscope. Each of the four voyages offered a
different perspective on human
nature. In two of these, Swift seems to view Gulliver
as
if through a microscope, then a telescope. In Lilliput,
Gulliver dwarfs
his captors, in Brobdingnag he is a plaything of giants.
Swift used the shifting dimensions of his hero to make
telling observations
on political events and the moral and social habits
of his day.
In
an age intoxicated by new scientific and territorial explorations,
Swift brilliantly parodied the 'perspectives'
revealed by
the new optical instruments. He remained sceptical
of the notion
of progress and despaired of the inevitable weakness
of man as a social animal.
Fortunately
for Swift's literary purposes, in 1726 the Antipodes was still
a suitably
remote and poorly
known
region in which
to locate his story. It remained so at his death
in 1745. He would have had little awareness that
the masses,
whose
collective
behaviour he so distrusted, were beginning to escalate
in numbers and social significance. The population
of Europe would double
between 1800 and 1900 from two to four hundred
million(4). Pressure from the
accompanying growth in the criminal population was one
of the factors that led to the British Government's
decision to solve the problem of their overcrowded
prisons by
establishing a penal colony as a strategic base
in
Australia.
In
1788 Governor Arthur Phillip (1738-1814)
proclaimed the region of the Australian continent
up to 135 degrees east
longitude as the British colony of New South
Wales, and began to build a settlement at Port Jackson
on the east coast with
little more than a thousand people, most of whom
were convicts. From that point on, some 160,000
men, women and youths were
transported to Australia, the majority to New
South Wales until 1840 and
to Tasmania until 1852. A final 9,700 were sent
to Perth, Western Australia, between 1850 and
1868(5). This massive movement
of people was prompted by the loss in 1776 of access
to the North American
colonies.
What
Swift would have made of this social experiment can only be
imagined, but present day Australian
writer, Robert
Hughes
(b.1938), has described Australia's foundation
as a dystopia, the model of the gulags of the
twentieth century(6).
From
the 1830s free settlers and assisted migrants
swelled the ranks, whilst the Aboriginal
people were being decimated.
By
1860 the population was well over a million,
half of whom were Australian-born, with convicts
representing
only a
small percentage.
By Federation in 1901, the white population
was mostly native-born and numbered three
and three-quarter
million.
The
British Government transported convicts in the hope that isolation
in a new land
would assist
in
their rehabilitation.
Later, free settlers came to Australia
in search of a change in fortune and status.
The early
photographers came from
both these groups of settlers until Alfred
Bock (1835-1920)
became the first known Australian-born
photographer. In 1855, on the death of his stepfather Thomas
Bock (1790-1855),
Alfred set up his own studio in Hobart.
Bock senior had been transported to Van Diemen's
Land in 1824, becoming respected
as a portrait painter in the 1830s, and
by the late 1840s one of the earliest resident
photographers. For many, such as Bock,
Australia was a land of hope and opportunity.
Photography predicted
The
possibility of a new scientific frontier was suggested in 1760
by the French writer Charles Tiphaigne de la Roche
(1729-1774).
In his book, Giphantia, a traveller in the African
desert is transported by a whirlwind to a land whose inhabitants
are
able to fix the images made by light rays. He describes how
using 'a most subtle matter, very viscous and proper to harden
and dry', coated on canvas, these images are impressed in
'the
twinkle of an eye, after which the canvas is dried in a dark
place for an hour. Once dry, the pictures 'cannot be imitated
by art or damaged by time'(7).
Tiphaigne
de la Roche was not a moralist like Swift, but a pioneer
of the literary genre of science fiction. Nevertheless,
both
writers used fantastic adventures to unknown lands to express
their ideas. What Tiphaigne described in Ciphantia was what
we
call photography-for which, it has been pointed out by
photo-historian Helmut Gernsheim (b.1913), the necessary
optical instruments and photochemical means of development
existed
as early as 1725(8). However,
serious efforts to fix light pictures, as formed in the drawing
aid known as a camera obscura,
were
not undertaken until the last years of the eighteenth century.
The writer of Giphantia did not live to see real photographs
as the earliest fixed images were not made until 1826. These
were by Joseph Niépce (1765-1833). Commercial
processes, the French daguerreotype and English photogenic
drawing, were
not made public in 1839.
This
century of tardiness prompted Gernsheim to remark that 'the
circumstance that photography
was not invented earlier
remains
the greatest mystery in its history'(9). Others
have puzzled over why similar precision instruments, the
telescope and
microscope, did not develop until the seventeenth century,
when lenses
and
eye glasses existed as early as the thirteenth century(10). The
same question has been asked of many inventions including
lithography,
developed in the 1790s by German Alois Senefelder (1771-1834),
which required only a slab of smooth stone and a greasy
crayon(11).
We
can only speculate as to why Captain Cook did not have a photographic
apparatus
for his Pacific voyages, Indeed
none
of the artists
on these expeditions are known to have used a camera
obscura, although later colonial artists and draughtsmen in
Australia
made some use of such aids(12).
Clues
as to the reasons behind inventions like photography
may be sought instead in a complex of artistic, scientific,
technological,
political, economic and social trends. Like the layers
of an onion these factors actually comprise the final
shape.
Chasing shadows
The
development of photography, itself an art-science, is a legacy
of inter-disciplinary exchanges. The early experimenters
and independent
inventors of photography were often artists and scientists simultaneously.
The subsequent history of the medium is a mosaic of contributions
by artists and scientists. The story of these pioneers has been
well documented in terms of a chronology of related optical instruments
and photochemistry.
The
refinement of the camera obscura in the seventeenth century,
culminating in its use for photography in
the 1840s, relates
both to the development of naturalistic representation in art
and to
the development of precision instruments like telescopes, microscopes,
marine chronometers, barometers and micrometers. These last
named enabled the plotting of specific points as coordinates
in time
and space; a feat instantly achieved with the full development
of photography in the nineteenth century. As exploration filled
in the world map, science and art developed techniques for
precise descriptions of its phenomena.
In
recent years photographic studies have been widened to include
a prehistory in vision and
taste, The existence of a highly
naturalistic, informal aesthetic, which seems to 'pre-visualise'
photography,
has been documented particularly in Europe in the half century
before 1839 (few Antipodean examples exist)(13).
These
aesthetic precedents have been placed in the context of
a widening social base following the French Revolution
of the
eighteenth
century and the Industrial Revolution in England going
into the nineteenth century. Naturalism in art, without complex
meanings,
was seen as being suited to the taste of the growing middle
classes. A new means of expression was required, one that
was accessible
to the new and international public(14).
The
expansion of the population in the nineteenth century
parallels the burgeoning of capitalism and industrialised
economics,
distinguished by the production of surplus goods. The
consumers of those goods
came from Europe but also from the widening world markets
offered by territorial expansion and imperialism. Photography
developed
as a medium of communication and expression capable of
matching this fantastic swarming of people, and reaching
easily across
the planet.
As
early as 1829 English historian Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881)
christened his era 'The Mechanical Age',(15) and
in 1857 Lady Elizabeth Eastlake (1809-1893) observed
that:
Photography
is made for the present age, in which the desire for art resides
in a small minority, but
the
craving, or
rather necessity,
for cheap, prompt and correct facts is in the public
at large. Photography is the purveyor of such knowledge
to
the world(16).
The
ubiquity of photography, often seen as a mechanical eye to be
used for this much-desired replication
of facts, also
brought
forth critical responses from nineteenth-century
writers like Frenchman Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867).
He was concerned by the acceptance of the photograph
as reality, its equation with art, and its narcissistic
elements as seen in the wish of 'our squalid society
... to gaze
at its trivial image on a scrap of metal. A madness,
an extraordinary fanaticism took possession of
all these new sun-worshippers(17).
A
critical tradition in this vein seems to run down through to
twentieth-century critics such
as Walter
Benjamin
(1892–1940).
Benjamin pondered the fate of 'The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in
his seminal essay of 1936(18), to contemporary American
writer, Susan Sontag (b. 1933). In turn her book
of essays, On Photography (1977), probed the morality of documentary
photography, observing that 'To collect photographs
is to collect the world'(19).
Picturing the Global Village
The
other component of the modern media, the electric telegraph,
was born at the same time as photography
and stemmed from the same
earlier researches into light, electricity and magnetism.
Both mediums were developed practically before it was realised
that
they were the visible and invisible forms of electro-magnetic
radiation(20). Eventually
photography and the wireless telegraph became wedded
in cinematic film and the 'media' of modern times(21).
In
the I950s Canadian popular culture analyst, Marshall McLuhan
(1911-1981), defined the twentieth century as the era
of the 'Global Village' in response to the international
impact of the media(22). McLuhan
regarded advertising, film and television
largely as a form of mass education in consumption.
In
the same years, Edward Steichen (1879-1973) expressed
another global vision through The Family of Man Exhibition
(1955) that he mounted for the Museum of Modern Art,
New York. The theme
of the exhibition, which later toured the world, was
the basic humanity linking the peoples of the world and it
expressed
Steichen's belief that photography was a major force
in
promoting peace
and understanding between people. A contemporary American
critic, Jacques
Barzun (b.1907)(23), rejected
its 'primitivism' which denied the regional, cultural
and economic divisions between
the
different peoples. It was the grand era of the United
Nations but also
of the cold war and fears of global nuclear annihilation.
The
Family of Man proclaimed itself the greatest photography
show ever mounted(24). In
its ambition and embracing of a world vision,
it echoed London’s Great Exhibition over a century
earlier, in 1851. The latter was concerned with production,
being a
display of the 'Works of Industry of All Nations'.
It was a major early
showcase for photography, although only six of the
more industrialised nations exhibited photographs(25).
George
Cruikshank's (1792-1878) image of All the world
going to see the Great Exhibition of 1851(26), encapsulates
the sense
of the new mass culture and international world at
mid-century. This consciousness also seems to be
reflected in the early
visual commentaries on photography which tend to
show amateur and professional
photographers swarming across the landscape, even
raining down from above(27).
While
the population was expanding, the world was apparently ‘shrinking’.
During the Great Exhibition of 1851, cartographer
and entrepreneur James Wyld (1812-1887) also
built, in Leicester Square, the largest model of
the globe ever seen. It showed how the
world, which had been so poorly known a century
before, was by 1851,
at
the feet of the London public(28).
This
'globalism' of the mid-nineteenth century had
already been envisaged in 1834 by the naturalist
Alexander Von
Humboldt (1769-1859)
when conceiving of his great publication describing
the natural history of the whole earth, to be
called COSMOS, Sketch of
a Physical Description of the Universe:
I have the crazy notion to depict in a single work the entire
material
universe, all that we
know
of the phenomena
of heaven
and earth,
from the nebulae of stars to the geography
of mosses and granite rocks and in a vivid style
that will
stimulate and elicit feeling(29).
A
desire to encompass the world was echoed by the Illustrated
London
News, which began
publication
in 1842. Despite
its title, the News was
dedicated to a massive international readership:
Through
all the world — wherever man can
read —
This humble book to him we dedicate —
Filled with thick events which God decreed,
To wield his fortunes and to work his
fate(30).
This
theme was still a powerful one in 1936 when LIFE magazine
was launched
in America
with a
dedication that echoed that
of the English prototype:
To
see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to
watch
the faces of
the poor and the
gestures of the
proud; to see strange things — machines,
armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and
on the moon; to see man's work(31).
This
global context, in both its
perceptual and economic-political
aspects, is one of the most interesting possible
impulses behind photography and
maybe one
of the many reasons why the medium reached
its flashpoint in 1839, and not in
1726.
In
1839, L.J.M. Daguerre's (1787-1851) process of photography
on metal plates was given free to all the world by
the French Government although it was withheld by Daguerre's
personal patent from commercial use in England and her
colonies. Details of W.H. Fox Talbot's
(1800-1877)
photogenic drawing process on paper were
also published(32). To scientists, photography
represented
a means
of absorbing the natural history of the
planet. To artists, it was a threat and a challenge.
To the people, it shortly became a means
of self-presentation
and
awareness. It was also a means of expressing
a sense of the global village that already
existed by the mid-nineteenth century.
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List
of illustrations used in the original publication (captions
may be abbreviated):
P.IX:
P.William Westall, Land on the north side of Port Bowen, 1802
P.X:
Alfred Bock: Self-Portrait, c.1855
P.XI:
Major James Wallis:Hawkesbury & Blue Mountains,
camera lucinda, 1815
P.XII:
George Cruikshank: All the world going to see the Great Exhibition,
1851