Australian early photographs on display in thematic exhibition

No significant nation’s history has been as thoroughly documented by photography as that of Australia.

Blizzard at Cape Denison in 1912. Pic Frank Hurley courtesy of the State Library of NSW.

No significant nation’s history has been as thoroughly documented by photography as that of Australia. The reason for this is primarily that colonisation began so late: among many things that differentiate our experience from that of the Americas is the reluctance of any European power to settle our continent. Elsewhere, new land was eagerly seized and claimed; here, the coast was explored and mapped for almost two centuries before the British finally decided to establish a colony at Sydney.

Photography has a long and fascinating prehistory, an important part of which is the Renaissance theory of perspective. The camera obscura was a device for projecting a light impression, but as with the later camera lucida, the image still had to be traced by hand. There were many early experiments with chemicals capable of fixing a projected image, but the first permanent solution was discovered by Nicephore ­Niepce in Paris in the 1820s.

Thus the invention of photography came little more than a generation after the landing of the First Fleet. Photography began to be widely accessible, in several technological forms, during the later 1830s and the 1840s, and it was immediately and enthusiastically adopted, as we can see in the Art Gallery of NSW’s survey of the subject, first of all for largely practical purposes, but soon also with aesthetic ambitions.

The most striking aspect of the exhibition — which is accompanied by a thorough and scholarly catalogue by Judy Annear — is the proliferation of portraits, from family groups to the carte-de-visite that became popular in the later 19th century, after the emperor Napoleon III provoked a craze for the new format. Strangest of all are a couple of enormous composite works made of hundreds of individual portrait heads collaged together.

The development of a technology that allowed multiple copies of portraits to be produced relatively cheaply coincided significantly with a new age of European colonisation. The age of exploration had begun 300 years earlier, and by the time Sydney was founded there had long been European colonies scattered around Africa and Asia — Batavia, now Jakarta, was once the closest outpost of European civilisation for the new colony — as well as systematic settlement throughout the Americas.

The 19th century, however, was a time of mass emigration, in which great numbers of Europeans moved permanently or semi-permanently to new colonial possessions in Africa and south and southeast Asia, although many of their descendants would later leave when these nations regained their independence. At the same time, millions of migrants poured into and populated Australia, Canada, the US, South America and other lands with a smaller number of indigenous inhabitants.

The travellers of earlier centuries had been seafarers and adventurers, but these new colonists were often people whose forebears had scarcely left their village or their province for hundreds of years. Suddenly they uprooted themselves and moved to the ends of the earth, in most cases never to see family and friends at home again. The pathos of emigration is a theme that pervades the art and literature of the 19th century, as is that of the colonist who returns home for one reason or another.

In these circumstances, portrait photography acquired an enormous importance, in allowing people to take the effigy of a parent, sibling or spouse with them, and correspondingly to leave their picture with loved ones. This is why so many people would put on their best suit and sit or stand in the picturesque but stilted settings of the photographic studios to have their portrait taken. The unfamiliarity and magic of the process in its early days were well brought out in an episode in Mike Leigh’s recent biographical film Turner.

Viewing them today in the exhibition is a melancholy, even troubling experience. Every one of these tiny portraits was of an individual loved by someone. Someone once looked at these features with tenderness, affection and longing. Others, on the other hand, may have been filled with contempt or rage by the sight of the same faces. But we will never know, for to us they all appear equally bland and mute.

The effect is aggravated by crowding, as our response to real human beings is, too. In a collage of early female colonists composed of row upon row of oval portraits, each individual is labelled with a letter of the alphabet and would have been identifiable by reference to a list of names; but to us they look like a dizzying array of old women in bonnets. Similarly there is a strange composite of the soldiers who went to the Sudan in 1885 following the death of General Charles George Gordon at Khartoum: with the senior and junior officers in the centre and two chaplains, one Catholic and the other presumably Anglican, all the rest of the soldiers are massed around the outside in a series of rings.

For contemporaries, many of these faces would have been recognisable, but it was only because they knew the people that the various features were meaningful. The images themselves tell us very little, and they make us realise that this is a fundamental problem with photography. We think that the likeness taken by a machine must be unquestionable, and yet how many of us think that our passport or driver’s licence photo even looks like us?

The material form of our appearance, as registered by mechanical means, in reality tells very little of who we are, and even the portraits of statesmen and authors and others who seem full of life to us are so only because we use the image essentially as a focus to crystallise our feelings and thoughts about the individual.

If these 19th-century portraits now have the rather sad quality of dried-up autumn leaves, at least they were rare or even solitary effigies, taken for a purpose and once precious to someone, unlike the random snaps and selfies of almost everyone living on the planet today.

Some even have intriguing hints of a hidden story, like the double portrait of John Gill and Joanne Kate Norton: if one can indeed call it a double portrait, for the little girl’s face is buried in the man’s shoulder. It is obviously highly unusual for a face to be deliberately concealed in a formal portrait, and one can’t help feeling that this must be a mourning portrait, possibly even a posthumous montage.

Portraits were not the only utilitarian function of photography in the early years of the colonies. There are numerous documentary pictures of the land and various scenes of settlement. One is a rather grim panorama of the settlement at Fremantle in Western Australia, presumably intended to demonstrate the progress made in the establishment of the port for the benefit of prospective migrants.

Other photographs of natural sites are more attractive, and from the mid-century begin to celebrate the picturesque beauty of the land. Melvin Vaniman, the American author of the Fremantle picture, also did a panorama of the Blue Mountains and one of the corner of Collins and Queen streets in Melbourne.

Stereographs, pairs of photographs taken with a two-lens camera and looked at in a special viewer to produce a three-dimensional effect, were very popular and particularly suited to subjects such as Ernest B. Docker’s The Three Sisters, Katoomba (1898), where the figures are placed to create foreground depth of field.

Among the most memorable landscape photographs are Frank Hurley’s extraordinary views of the icy coast of Antarctica. Axel Poignant’s famous picture of a eucalypt, which he ­titled The Spirit of Endurance (1937), borrows a theme from Hans Heysen and elevates the motif into a symbol of the national spirit.

Images of men and women often become — unexpectedly enough — more humanly touching when they represent anonymous people. Thus Max Dupain’s famous Sunbaker (1937) epitomises in an entirely non-rhetorical manner the interwar concerns with health, fitness and the enjoyment of nature and particularly the beach, which became emblematic of the Australian experience. David Moore’s Migrants Arriving in Sydney (1966) is less concerned with the individual personalities of the group than the way their different expressions weave together, like musical instruments playing in an ensemble, to produce a collective sense of the experience of arrival in a new land.

Among the most fascinating images are those of Aborigines, testifying to a much higher level of interest in the land’s indigenous inhabitants than was common among white Australians in the 20th century: there are portraits of individuals, examples of ethnic types and picturesque costumes, as well as views of communities and reservations. The reality of dispossession is undeniable, but the imagery consistently demonstrates at least curiosity and often sympathy.

The exhibition is a large one, and it is structured thematically rather than chronologically, which has certain advantages though it also leads to inevitable questions as to why a given picture appears in one room rather than another. The emphasis is on the first century of photography in Australia, but the exhibition is scattered with a selection of contemporary works: perhaps in keeping with some directive from above, since the same approach has been adopted, with even more mixed results, as we saw earlier this year in the Asian collection.

The show starts with a fascinating collection of portraits and self-portraits of the photographers and proceeds through a series of rooms titled Imagining Place, People and Place, Picturing the Colony, Cities and Communities, Becoming Modern, Critique, Technology and Time, and finally Transmission. In practice, the risks of arbitrariness inherent in any such taxonomy are mitigated by the curator’s aesthetic sense of the coherence of hanging and the dialogue that it is possible to set up between works.

The core of the exhibition is the third room, which contains the rarest and most precious daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and other early forms of photography, which can only be shown at very low light levels. Quiet, dark and intense, this room offers not only an opportunity to study such very different techniques but also to ponder our enduring fascination with seizing and fixing these fleeting traces of people and places before they disappear or change forever.

A book associated with this exhibition, The Photograph and Australia, is published by Art Gallery of NSW Publishing, 308pp, $75 (HB)

The Photograph and Australia

Art Gallery of NSW until June 8.