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A Quick Look at South Australian Photographic History South Australia’s history comes alive through photographs seen in books, museums, magazines, newspapers and on films and television. This page provides some paragraphs from the story behind the photographs.
Where further information about the subject of the paragraph has already been loaded onto this site its location on the CONTENTS menu will be given, for example Miscellaneous/Calotype. Where the location has been underlined it is a direct link to the page e.g. click on Miscellaneous/Calotype and you can go direct to the page concerned then return here by using your BACK button.
The very first photographs made in South Australia were daguerreotypes, which were highly detailed images formed by mercury clinging to the highly polished surface of a silver-coated copper plate. The image was easily damaged and was preserved by sealing it behind a piece of glass and then mounting it in a decorated case. An Adelaide optician, William Little, experimented with the daguerreotype in August 1845, and when he ran out of plates he tried making images on paper. A daguerreotypist from Melbourne was the first to make portraits in Adelaide, in January 1846. South Australian daguerreotypes are extremely rare. Do you know of any that are in private collections or regional museums? The exposure for a daguerreotype portrait at that time could be anything from 20 seconds to a minute. CONTENTS/Daguerreotypes is a direct link to some South Australian daguerreotypists.
The earliest known images of South Australia are four calotypes in the collection of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. The calotype was a paper print made from a paper negative, and is very grainy in appearance due to the paper fibres in the negative. The calotypes show Port Adelaide and the Burra mine as they were when photographed by the unknown calotypist c1850-52 and can be seen using Miscellaneous/Calotype as a direct link.
South Australia’s most notorious photographer would have to be William James Lott. His dastardly deeds were reported in great detail in the press of the day. Lott had a studio in Rundle Street, Adelaide, called the Paris Photographic Company, and in 1877 the report of his divorce proceedings included the words ‘shameful depravity, wanton cruelty, pitiful cowardice, utter baseness.’ It said the bulk of the report was unfit for publication. ‘It depicts a creature thoroughly steeped in sensuality, lost to all sense of moral restraint, natural affection and common decency.’ The judge said it was ‘one of the most filthy and brutal of all the cases that had come under his notice.’ But that was only the start of it. Lott tried to burn down his studio, took in a dissipated English barrister who had been banished to Australia by his family, drained him of money, beat him, and when he died of neglect tried to extract money from the family using a photograph he had made of what he claimed was the dead man’s will. Read about the bad Lott at Photographers/Lott W.J.
During the 19th century, and later, photographers made panoramas by
mounting their camera on a tripod and scanning a scene, taking a series of photographs in
which the camera was moved between each exposure so that the pictures slightly overlapped.
The finished prints were then mounted side-by-side to make the finished panorama. Two such
panoramas have been included on this site, one looking over Port Lincoln that Richard Hall
made around 1877, and one of Elder Range in the Flinders Ranges made by Henry Tilbrook in
September 1894. Both panoramas are several screens wide and you can scroll horizontally to
see their full width. Direct Links are:
During the 19th century the term panorama also had another meaning, which was not photographic. A series of scenes was painted on an enormous roll of canvas which was mounted on vertical rollers and wound across the stage of the theatre. As each scene was wound onto the stage a lecturer would describe it and all sorts of lighting and sound effects brought into play. One panorama seen in Adelaide was made up of 120 paintings 25 feet long by 14 feet high, making a canvas that was 3,000 feet long and took two hours to unroll. A description of some of the panoramas brought to South Australia will be found under Magic Lanterns/Moving Panoramas.
The first South Australian Rontgen-ray (X-ray) photographs were made in 1896 with a Crooke’s tube brought from England by Mr S. Barbour. The exposures used for X-rays of various parts of the body varied from 5 to 20 minutes. The apparatus was demonstrated before a group of Adelaide doctors, and a newspaper report said that the medical men were ‘highly delighted with the achievements’ and satisfied the discovery would be of great value to their profession. ‘Already there are people waiting who want the situation of needles and bullets in various parts of the body detected.’ The story of the introduction of X-rays into South Australia can be seen at Miscellaneous/Rontgen Rays, including a copy of an X-ray photograph taken in September 1896 showing the location of a needle that had been lodged in a woman’s hand for five years, and after the X-ray was taken the needle could be removed.
The Stanhope was a novelty item in which a microphotograph was viewed through a tiny lens (less than 2 millimetres in diameter) concealed in some everyday object such as a pen or knife-handle. In 1861 photographer Robert Hall imported some Stanhopes which contained a variety of respectable images, but this was not the case when some watch keys were imported in 1869 and confiscated by Customs. They contained ‘obsecene and indecent’ photographs which were punched out and destroyed. See Miscellaneous/Stanhopes.
One of the assignments the 19th century photographer could expect to receive was a request to photograph a deceased loved one. Although still practiced to a degree today, in the wet-plate era this was a difficult task that could involve transporting chemicals and processing equipment to a home as the wet-plate negative had to be coated and sensitised on the spot and then developed immediately after exposure. A few 19th century post-mortem images and a native burial scene at Kapunda in 1867 (taken with permission of participants) can be found at Miscellaneous/Post Mortem.
From as early as the 1860s South Australia had a number of gentleman 'amateur' photographers whose work was much better than many who classed themselves as 'professionals' because it was their occupation, and some say this state of affairs has continued to the present day. The section Camera Clubs gives some details of the clubs, societies and associations which were formed for the benefit of both amateurs and professionals, the earliest known being the Photographic Association of South Australia of 1882. In the early 1900s a number of clubs were formed, the most notable being the Adelaide Camera Club which began as the Malvern Photo Club in 1902, and is not far from celebrating one hundred years of distinguished service to photography.
Henry Tilbrook was an amateur photographer with a difference -- he recorded many of his photographic experiences and these have survived in his reminiscences. Henry founded the Northern Argus newspaper at Clare in 1869 and by the early 1880s had become an enthusiastic amateur photographer. After he retired to live in East Adelaide in 1891 he went on a series of camping trips, and while his companions went off hunting and fishing Henry tramped around alone with his 38 pounds of camera equipment, photographing anything he thought would make an interesting picture. He was photographing in the Flinders Ranges in 1894, after which he made several trips to the South East of South Australia, with one excursion over the border into Victoria. Henry Tilbrook could not include himself in his photographs of the Flinders so he devised a remote control shutter release using a long string threaded through wire loops on pegs pushed into the ground. Henry has, and deserves, his own special place on this site. You can see some of his photographs and read in his own words how he went about taking photographs while camping out between 1894 and 1905. Your direct link to Henry Tilbrook’s personal menu is Photographers/Tilbrook H.
Taking portraits by any means other than sunlight was impossible during the wet-plate era, c1855-1880. Lenses were slow, and the light-sensitive coating on the wet-collodion glass plate barely registered the yellow light emitted by the oil and gas lamps then in use. Although the light given off by burning magnesium wire was tried with limited success, it was not until electric arc-lamps and dry-plates were available that portraits by artificial light became practical. In July 1865 Fraser Crawford of the Adelaide Photographic Company used magnesium wire to make what are believed to be the earliest recorded artificial light portraits made in Australia. See Miscellaneous/Artificial Light Photography.
Fraser Crawford went on to become South Australia’s first Government Photo-Lithographer, in January 1867, and one of his first duties in that position was to photograph the prisoners in the Adelaide gaol and at the Stockade (Yatala). This may have been the first time that prisoners were systematically photographed in a prison anywhere in Australia. Photographs of prisoners were taken at Darlinghurst gaol in Sydney in 1872 and at Port Arthur c1873-74. Crawford had supplied 150 carte de visite portraits of prisoners to the Commissioner of Police by September 1867. In South Australia the Rainberd murderers had been photographed in 1861, and a prisoner named Seaver had been photographed in 1862. Crawford was eventually considered too old to be head of his department, and efforts to have him step down from the position failed. It was not until he died that the Government was able to replace him. See Miscellaneous/Government Photo-Lithographer.
The long exposures required for taking portraits in the 19th century, and later, caused a problem for photographers. No matter how much a subject tried to stay still while the cap was off the lens, which could be for five to twenty seconds, there was always a tendency for the upper body, especially the head, to sway from side to side, causing a blurring of the picture. The headrest was a piece of studio equipment designed to eliminate this, and was being offered for sale in Australia as late as 1916. The use, and abuse, of the headrest is discussed under Miscellaneous/Head Rest.
While the headrest was used to steady the head during the long exposures needed for portrait taking, the eye rest was used to give the sitter a point to fix the eyes on during exposure. If the sitter held a rigid pose but allowed the eyes to wander about the room while the picture was taken the result would have been a pait of empty eye sockets, no pupil recorded on the negative. Sometimes a portrait will be found where the face has faded but the colour used to ink in a pair of pupils has not. Eye Rests are discussed under Miscellaneous/Eyerest.
Mosaics of photographic portraits were popular in the 19th century, and for some time after 1900. The best known is perhaps the mosaic of almost 700 South Australian "lady old colonists" which Henry Jones started in 1872 and took nine years to complete. It is held in the Mortlock Library and, considering its age, is in very good condition. You can find information about this and other South Australian mosaics at Miscellaneous/Mosaics.
Photographers often worked with substances which were either dangerous or needed to be handled with great care. The wet-plate process used collodion which was prepared from guncotton, an explosive, and contained ether, and the resulting preparation was highly inflammable. Daguerreotypists worked with mercury and were probably never aware of the risks this involved, and cyanide was also used in some processes. In 1871 Naracoorte photographer William Coles had a lucky escape. One night he slept in his studio and took a drink from a glass which he thought contained water, but which was actually a cyanide solution. It took him some time to recover from the effects of his near fatal mistake.
For most of the 19th century the only photographic paper used for making positive prints was albumen paper. The surface of the paper was coated with albumen containing some light sensitive chemicals after which it was sensitised by floating it albumen side down on another solution. As a rule the paper was bought already coated with albumen, then sensitised and dried in a light proof area by the photographer the day before it was to be used. Vast quantities of eggs were used to supply the world-wide demand for albumenised paper, and one German factory is said to have consumed the whites of 18 million eggs a year. Little is known about the fate of the yolks.
More paragraphs will be added as the site is enlarged.
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