Overview
Project status: In progress
- Research leader
- Organisational unit
- Lead unit Creative Industries Faculty
- Start date
- 1st January 2006
- End date
- 1st January 2009
- Research area
- Innovation in the performing and digital arts
Dr Victoria Garnons-WilliamsDetails
Circa 1870, an album of original photographs taken in the studio of J.W. Lindt in Grafton, NSW, was gifted, as Lindt was to do regularly, to an illustrious personage, in this case the mayor of Grafton. The album, consisting of 19 tableau and portrait photographs of aborigines mounted on its pages, has one such page torn loose and many empty.
Lindt was looking for characters and types to realize his lucrative album project. He laboured assiduously to obtain the highest class of photographs and was remarkably canny in his entrepreneurial strategies. His superiority of technique was matched by a deep understanding of the social and cultural context of at the time and fuelled by consistent energy and opportunism.
The presentation of research is based on three specific images that provide the catalyst for analytical narratives, which consider technical, social historical and monetary aspects of Lindt's work.
Project description
Focus
Original album of J W Lindt photographs of Aborigines in Grafton, NSW, 1872-4.
Context
Contribution to the New Histories strand of the conference.
On LSL, I travelled to Grafton in pursuit of a suspected original JW Lindt photographic album of Aboriginal studio portraits, and had the opportunity to study the album for several hours. Some of the images were familiar through other copies available elsewhere, but the album included several that are as yet unpublished or not ever exhibited.
The most important aspect of the album is its entirety. Lindt self-selected the images included and as such, the album can be seen as his oeuvre. The album includes a striking and highly modernist image as the last image, signifying a radical departure in not only Lindt's own works, but in photographic portraiture altogether. The rest of the album is a set of highly elaborate studio sittings, excellent examples of the Pictorialist style. This contrast of style and technique provides within the one album the evidence for the aesthetic evolution of photography.
This research also explored the contextual relationships of the history of Grafton at that particular time, Lindt's relationship with his indigenous subjects, and the technical and aesthetic evolution taking place within photography.
