EARLY SOUTH AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHY

Photography arrived in South Australia with Mr W. Little of North Terrace, who set up as a daguerreotpyist in 1845. The earliest South Australian photographs still in existence were taken five years later by Robert Tennent from Scotland, during a short visit to South Australia. He photographed Port Adelaide, Hindley Street and the Burra Mines using calotype paper negatives, from which he then created salted paper prints. These rare and historic photographs are held in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Prior to Tennent's calotypes, the first five years of photography in South Australia were dominated by the daguerreotpe process, which had first been announced by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre in 1839. This process created a highly detailed image on the mirror-like surface of a silver-plated copper sheet. The second daguerreotpyist mentioned in the South Australian Register in 1845 was the notable painter S.T. Gill, who imported his daguerreotpye equipment from England. In January 1846, a third daguerreotypist - G.B. Goodman from Melbourne - set up a studio in Adelaide for six weeks. He was followed by Edward Schohl from Hamburg, who offered a daguerreotpye service with his partner, Haseltine, for four months. By April 1846 Adelaide had its first permanent photographer in the person of Robert Hall. Hall bought S.T. Gill's camera from him when Gill departed on the Horrocks expedition, and set up in Currie Street. Hall continued to make daguerreotype portraits until his death in 1866. He also used the ambrotype process, which became popular in the late 1850s as a faster and cheaper alternative to the daguerreotpye. Ambrotypes were made from under-exposed collodion negatives on glass, which appeared as a positive image when placed over a black coating.

Adelaide's photographic industry grew as new photographic technologies evolved. In the late 1850s photography was revolutionisted by the advent of the collodion wet plate negative and albumen silver photograph printing process. Unlike the ambrotype and daguerreotpe, which yielded only one image from each exposure, collodion negatives could be used to print multiple albumen silver photographs. With these faster and more economical processes the photography market grew dramatically, particularly with the craze for cartes de visite. Cartes de visite were small albumen silver photographs pasted onto a cardboard mount, the size of a calling card. They could be produced in large numbers and used as calling cards, or easily enclosed with letters to friends and relatives interstate and overseas. Soon South Australia boasted hundreds of photographers servicing this demanding market. The best remembered and most prolific of these was Townsend Duryea, an American who moved to Adelaide in 1854, after two years in Melbourne. Duryea began a small photographic empire with studios around the state run by his four sons and a photographic practice that was passed on to his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He specialised in portraits which formed the bulk of his work, but is best known for his panoramas of Adelaide, including his 360 degree 1865 panorama of Adelaide taken from the tower of the Town Hall.

When Captain Sweet arrived in Adelaide to set up his photographic practice in 1866, the city was already well serviced with portrait photographers like Townsend Duryea, Bernard Goode, and Philip Marchant. There were also a large number of rural and travelling photographers around South Australia, including Samuel Nixon and Robert Stacy. Many photographers kept to studio portraiture but a few, like Bernard Goode, George Freeman and Townsend Duryea, took landscape photographs and views of Adelaide's buildings and city streets. Captain Sweet remained the foremost landscape photographer in South Australia until his death in 1886.

© Karen Magee 2008 - 2009