(Installation View, pp. 57–60)
In the latter part of the nineteenth century, as the medium matured, photography was associated with the social prestige of science, art and travel, and became a means for groups of powerful men to meet and bond. For instance, before coming to Australia, the president of the Melbourne Chamber of Commerce, Benjamin Cowderoy, William Henry Fox Talbot’s, printing establishment in Reading, England. Talbot was one of the inventors of photography, but unlike the polished metal plate of daguerreotype, his process involved printing a positive from a paper negative. In 1846 Cowderoy assisted with the production of Talbot’s seminal book The Pencil of Nature and helped promote Talbot’s process. Almost half a century later, in 1893, he lectured on his relationship with Talbot at a Chamber of Commerce social function. At the same event, Melbourne’s most prominent photographer, J. W. Lindt, showed lantern slides of the New Hebrides, and Victoria’s chief astronomer, H. L. J. Ellery, showed lantern slides of the sun, moon and stars taken at the Melbourne Observatory.
Two years later, in early 1895, an exhibition to celebrate the ‘jubilee’ of photography was held at the Royal Exhibition Building in Carlton. Described as ‘comprehensive representation of the art of photography as practised in Melbourne’, it included a suite of Lindt’s photographs of New Guinea. Cowderoy exhibited a group of his personal talbotypes from his days working with the famous Talbot, about which the Melbourne Argus newspaper commented:
The specimens which are considered of most interest are those which represent portions of Laycock Abbey [sic] or the adjacent park … As these pictures are nearly 50 years old, and were produced when the chemistry of the process was less perfectly known than now, they have, for the most part, a very faded appearance as compared with the fresh and newly executed works of today.1
Entertaining important men was part of Lindt’s business. In a photograph from the mid 1880s, he is shown entertaining gentlemen at his studio at Ethelred, in Hawthorn. Gathered beneath a solar enlargement of his famous New Guinea photographs and his collection of native weapons, one of the men examines the enlarged details of a photograph through a graphoscope. In 1894, Lindt moved to the Black Spur near Healesville and opened his guest house, The Hermitage, where he continued to entertain his guests with ‘a tour through Fiji, New Guinea, and the New Hebrides’ by showing 200 views of the islands, ‘enlarged by the optical lantern’.2