Perfect. Well, I know I'm occupying the before-afternoon-tea spot, with the hard task of following Stephen's amazing paper. And, I'd like
to join with thanking... join all my fellow presenters this morning in thanking the Bodleian team, Richard Overton,
Lucy Bailey, everyone who's put on this inspiring event; Geoff Batchen for inviting me and also for fostering my research in this area,
along with a whole lot of other Australian historians who are doing incredible work.
And I feel not un-intimidated by the fact that I am representing the Southern Hemisphere, as it would be, in this scholarship.
And, Miriam spoke this morning about how important it was to position yourself in the history that you're writing.
So, in that flavour, I want to acknowledge that I work on the unceded lands of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri People
in Kamberri, Canberra, in Australia, and pay my respects to their Elders past, present and emerging.
I work on the geographic periphery of Empire and much like the people I study, the colonial past is palpably present in my archive and my images.
Okay, onward. British photographers away from home, J.W. Newland and Louisa How.
These sixth and quarter-plate portraits of unidentified men may appear somewhat typical of the mid-Daguerreian period in pose and composition.
However, they bookend the rather exceptional global career of their photographer, J.W. Newland. Today, somewhat poetically.
this story of Newland's career comes full circle by these daguerreotypes placement, for the first time,
side-by-side, in 'A New Power', in that very long vitrine
towards the end. The portraits were taken in two of the busiest mid-19th century ports, New Orleans and Kolkata,
and are part of a broader story about the entanglement between imperial politics,
photographic knowledge and an expanding global market for illustrated publishing.
They map the nautical arc of Newland's career, which brings other ports, photographs and artists into view.
My paper is about this arc. It is about port cities as productive spaces for early photography,
pausing on one port on Newland's route, particularly: Sydney on Gadigal and Cammeraygal Country,
which consolidated not only his own peripatetic photographic practice, but also that of another British-born photographer, Louisa How.
But first, Newland. James
William Newland was born in Redgrave, Suffolk in 1810, the first illegitimate child of Eliza Newland.
His modest family fortunes mean that there are very few archival records pertaining to his childhood and early life,
a problem that seems to have reoccurred in today's papers.
Newland left England in the mid 1830s and thus did not experience a culture of commercial photography in his own country.
He worked as a merchant in Galveston, in a mixed business, in Texas before opening his own photographic rooms in New Orleans in May 1845,
perhaps after a period of indenture at a larger American studio.
Newland's rooms sat at a junction of Royal and Canal Streets just up from the Mississippi River.
Here, as our first daguerreotype demonstrates, he was taking commissions for portraits on Scovills
plates (manufactured in Connecticut) and housed in Mathew Brady cases and blind stamped on the gilt mat with his own name.
(So a mixed authorship, in a sense.) The junction was also home to three other daguerreotype businesses.
In the summer months of 1845, when lots of the city's entertainments had wound down on account of the heat,
Newland could not compete with these more established artists.
Particularly, each of his three competitors coupled their studios with galleries where prospective sitters could
gaze on an assortment of faces from the city's transient populations before commissioning their own portraits.
Newland left New Orleans in June 1845 and, rather than move to a different North American city,
he began a period of intense itinerancy. Between late 1845 and 1847,
Newland travelled through Central and South America.
His route was neither spontaneous nor incidental but rather connected to stable parts of British influence and trade. In each port,
he took commissions for portraits but also began consolidating a suite of second exposures of these same paying clients.
(So he exposed two plates: one left the studio with the client and the other he kept for himself, while also taking a number of daguerreotype views.)
These were geographies where British news and illustrated periodicals like the
Athenaeum and the Art Journal were freely available as a corollary of commodity trade.
We know that Newland was reading this literature because while in Central America he mail ordered
equipment from British suppliers advertising in these publications to meet him in Australia.
In 1847, Newland was at the American Hotel in Valparaiso, Chile, where once again he was taking daguerreotype portraits.
Here he began to unpack what was now quite an extensive cache of daguerreotypes. In Chile,
sitters could inspect views at the Peruvian town of Arequipa, and the port at Callao, before sitting for their own daguerreotype.
Unlike the American daguerreotypists of Charles and Jacob Ward, or Robert H. Vance, who were all in Valparaiso at this time,
Newland did not take his collection of Central and South American views and portraits back to North America for exhibition.
Nor did he return to North America to relaunch his business in the context of the American-Mexican War,
or with the emerging boom of landscape photography,
as would be the case for people like Carleton E. Watkins, who was travelling through Central and South America during this time also.
Rather, Newland set out across the Pacific. His ship called at the port of
Papeete, in Tahiti; at Aitutaki, in the present day Cook Islands, and in the Bay of Islands, Aotearoa/New Zealand.
Newland was the first daguerreotypist to travel through these three ports.
(I am pretty sure of that claim. Although "firsts" is a problem, I do take that point.)
In 1843, the French invasion of Tahiti had expelled British Protestant missionaries and left the indigenous queen Pomare IV,
a mere constitutional figurehead. In the Bay of Islands in New Zealand,
Māori attacks on the colonial invaders at the garrison of Russell threatened the Bay's security as a point of rest for international shipping.
Both of these very recent inter-imperial and inter-colonial conflicts were reported on globally.
They were followed very, very closely in the port city of Sydney, in the colony of New South Wales, on the Pacific's periphery.
Newland arrived in Sydney in February 1848 with the largest collection of photographs to cross the Pacific.
He opened his first studio on the corner of George and King Streets, just up from the docks. In New Orleans of Valparaiso,
Newland had multiple daguerreotype businesses as competition.
But in Sydney, there was just one other daguerreian studio, that of Isaac Pollock.
(Goodman, who Stephen mentioned in his paper, had long since left.)
In his opening advertisement, Newland informed prospective customers that in visiting his studio-cum-gallery,
they could, quote, "see upwards of 200 daguerreotypes.
Among them, the only correct portrait taken of Queen Pomare, her consort, the King, the royal family, chiefs, portraits of New Zealanders, Fijians,
[b which I infer he means Indigenous People of Aitutaki] Chileans, Grenadians and Co., as well as views of the port in Arequipa and Co."
In its design, Newland's Sydney Gallery was very much like that of his New Orleans competitors,
Or that of now-much-more-famous names in photography than him:
Brady, Plumbe, Edward Anthony, even Claudet: it was an adjoining room to a studio space for preview of the daguerreotypist's work.
Yet in its content, Newland's now-lost collection was unparalleled.
It was a direct product of his westward travel and a unique experience of verisimilitude through British, French and ex-Spanish colonial worlds
that trajectory afforded. The centrepiece was the Tahitian Queen Pomare's portrait, and the word "correct" here in Newland's description is illuminating.
He backed on the fact that Sydney colonial audiences were curious about Pomare's "true" likeness.
This curiosity was generated over a past decade by her multiple incarnations
in the illustrated Anglophone and Francophone press,
which coupled the French invasion of Tahiti, and only some of which I've included on the slide here.
[I think you are a slide ahead of where you think you are. Oh, okay.]
[Thank you. Yes.] These representations in engraved, printed and sketched form, all by imperial artists, cast Pomare IV
alternatively and incongruously as a plaint beauty, a Christian mother, and an embattled Madonna.
The portraits, which circulated through Sydney in illustrated periodicals and print folios,
speak to the malleability of the Queen's non-photographic image,
which was imbued with a dizzying variety of devices: allegory, racialisation, sexualisation and satire.
Newland's Gallery was the first chance any audience outside Tahiti had to view Pomare's likeness beyond caricature.
He also gave Sydney customers the chance to include their own daguerreotype portraits, made in his studio,
but included in his gallery, and thus to visualise themselves as part of this transnational trans-imperial Pacific world in flux.
Newland and his gallery would travel onward to Nipaluna/Hobart in present day Tasmania/Lutruwita and then forward still on to Kolkata.
Here we meet up with the second of our daguerreotypes.
This gentleman probably looked at Newland's daguerreian gallery in his regal Loudon's building rooms before commissioning his own portrait. By Kolkata,
the expansive collection of daguerreotypes included a view of the port at Hobart,
A second copy of which was left back at the Colony.
[And this is from the Australian Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery collection.]
By Kolkata, Newland's brand was individualised and clearly defined.
He had done away with his American suppliers and was importing British cases that he embossed with his own gold stamp.
Throughout the duration of his career, Newland would return to London only once, in 1854, to personally update his kit and equipment.
Upon arriving back in Kolkata in 1855 and, until his death during the Indian Uprising in 1857,
Newland positioned himself not only as a photographer and a gallerist,
but also as a retailer of photographic materials, a broker of photographic materials,
and a provider of photographic instruction, specifically to an emerging class of local Bengali photographers.
And this is the first edition... I am one slide ahead of myself.
I did have a slide there, which was the first edition of the Bengali Photographic Journal, which showed Newland's advertisement across
the whole back page. Yes.
So, it is on this point of thinking about how photographic instruction was increasingly advertised, but also serialised,
and the possibilities this afforded for how knowledge circulated beyond Britain
that we moved back to Sydney Harbour and the second of our biographies.
Louisa How, formerly Elizabeth Richardson, arrived in the Australian colonies ten months after Newland's departure.
She may have heard whispers of Newland's daguerreian gallery, but she was too late to see it first-hand.
Like Newland, How was born into a relatively modest family in England.
The daughter of a publican, she began her professional life as a milliner in the parish of St Peters on the outskirts of Cambridge. In 1841,
Louisa married labourer, James How, and the couple immigrated to the Australian colonies in 1849
and with their two sons under the Assisted Immigration Scheme, arriving in Port Phillip,
Melbourne, Bunurong Boon Wurrung Country in the same year. The arrival documents classify Louisa as a "housekeeper".
This annotation, along with her class and gender, make it unlikely that she arrived with any formal photographic training.
However, unlike Newland, she would have experienced a culture of photography in her home country, more broadly, before her departure.
The How family travelled north to Sydney and had precipitously ascended the colonial social hierarchy by the second half of the 1850s.
James How was one of the principal directors of How, Walker and Co.,
a merchant shipping business based on Campbell's Wharf, on the west side of Sydney Cove.
The How's lived across the harbour in present day Kirribilli, in Cammeraygal Country, at a waterfront homestead called "Woodlands".
(And I've marked this on the map and these two points basically almost exactly represent the Harbour Bridge,
( for Anyone who's familiar with that - That's the kind of space we're dealing with here.
Obviously, long before it was built.) In the half-decade period between Newland's departure and the How's bourgeois ascent,
(so from being married to a labourer to living in Kirribilli)
A plethora of photographers had opened businesses in the port city. In September 1857,
one amateur photographer, William Haes, was lecturing on the wax paper process at the Philosophical Society,
encouraging members who possessed interesting specimens to bring them along for discussion.
Professional calotypist, William Hetzer, ran a commercial photography studio on George Street and
also hosted an amateur camera club. Comprising exclusively of professional men such as himself,
Hetzer's parties set off on weekends to photograph the urban landscape.
The group conceived of themselves as answering the clarion call of publications like The Photographic News,
who had columns dedicated to colonial Australian photography.
Hetzer's parties embraced the new mobile apparatus for capturing stereo photographs, as seen here
in an advertisement from The Photographic News. Hetzer exhibited a suite of his own stereo views in late 1858 in his studio and then,
along with a party of 25 professional and amateur photographers,
all of whom were male, held a tremendously sizeable show of thousands of colonial views inter-spliced with imported European and British material,
In December 1859. So that's a bit of context.
Louisa How may have known Hetzer and his society of amateurs,
but on account of her gender, was excluded from his camera club and fraternities like
the Philosophical Society where conversations about photography were taking place.
Nevertheless, possibly after a small amount of private instruction, and after reading essays on photography and the illustrated press,
How taught herself photography. (And I think she's working with the calotype process -
I know it is quite late - and the early wax paper process.) Concurrent to this boom in amateur and professional photography in Sydney,
How was assembling an album of salt prints taken across the other side of the harbour at her home in Woodlands.
This album includes portraits of her husband and her friends, some of whom were amateur photographers themselves.
Many of the men pose in a mock studio setting that How had staged on her balcony.
And I am particularly fond of the portrait in the bottom left-hand corner,
which shows the sandstone facade of house's balcony, with the sandstone colonnade, ringed with actual vines,
which of course, becomes a motif for faux backdrops.
And, then, How has put a bed sheet up as the reminder of the backdrop. And I think that's possibly a perfect representation of colonisation and colonial photography.
Her subjects are captured with the regular accoutrements of portrait photography in the colonies:
books and unfold letters, signifiers of correspondence and learning over distance.
Somewhat uniquely, though, there is an overwhelming representation of men with stereo cards and stereo viewers giving the
sense that Woodlands, the How's home, was also a place for discussing photographic technologies.
How's album includes the oldest extant photographic portrait of a woman taken by a woman in the Australian colonies.
The portrait is of How's maid, Mrs. Lamont, and is one of two photographs of women in How's album of over fifty salt prints.
The other female subject is the Dowager Countess of Darnley, not photographed from life but from a stipple engraving. In 1982,
Isobel Crombie, another great Australian art historian,
traced the basis of How's portrait back to an engraving published in the 1850 edition of the English Art Journal,
which was widely available in Sydney. Yet the engraving itself was a copy of Sir Thomas Lawrence's portrait of the Countess,
painted originally as an oil-on-canvas and first exhibited in Vernon's Gallery in London, before being acquired by the Tate in 1847.
The 1850 edition of the Art Journal, also contained extensive essays,
as most of you probably already know, on photography by Robert Hunt and reflections on Talbot's patent,
which is coming to an end, and of course, writings on the early wax paper process and experiments with glass as substrate.
Excluded from the men's camera clubs, Louisa engaged with increasingly globalised culture of photography, transmitted through illustrated publications.
She digested a literature about and on photography imported from overseas while following, also at a distance, local photographic activity.
She set out to construct a colonial world, beginning with her own maid on her front porch,
then picturing her husband and her friends, who visited her home,
moving outward to document the maritime,
commerce and waterways that delivered her photographic news and which spiralled right back to the Dowager Countess'
portrait in London. Louisa How's colonial salt print album is full of contradictions and complexities:
it is both domestic, made in her home, and expansive;
it is definitely colonial, but it's also very sensitive;
it is provincial and peripheral, twice over,
yet, it is also at a centre of a conversation about photography that she is hosting.
So, how do we conceive of either of these two photographers?
Newland, whose first photography rooms opened in the carnival port city of New Orleans,
using Brady cases and Scovills' plates with his own blind stamp;
who then consolidated his practice and importantly devised an experience of photography based on his own travel through American and Pacific Ports,
which he unpacked for Sydney audiences in 1848.
Newland's gallery was not one of Brady-esque respectability,
nor peopled exclusively with high-profile dignitaries as founded in Claudet's London establishment.
Tethered to British suppliers and contingent on a received reading of illustrated publications,
Newland's gallery, wielded the new power of photography in ways that emboldened his colonial clients.
Louisa How's photographic practice was in some ways more sedentary than Newland's,
yet it constellated a visual world that began on her own veranda, with her maid, and her husband, and her friends.
It moved outward to reference the local photographic culture,
but also scanned across the harbour to the shipping routes that delivered her photographic news and two-dimensional photographic subjects from London.
Her album is a distilled vision and, in my opinion, a perfect meditation on what photography was as a mobile transient enterprise.
So how do we conceive of these two aquatic practitioners of early photography, in many ways
conceptually ahead of their time and the photographic technologies at their disposal?
Certainly we cannot simply refer to them as British photographers away from home.