iliracles of photography came to Chch in 1850s

Press, 1 April 1989, Page 21

iliracles of photography came to Chch in 1850s

By

CHRISTOPHER MOORE

ON FEBRUARY 5, 1868 Henry Gourlay pointed his cumbersome wooden camera towards a group of fellow colonists in Christchurch and took a photograph. There was nothing especially remarkable about the occasion — yet another Victorian civic banquet to greet two visiting nabobs — but Gourlay’s photograph survives as a sigularly remarkable testimony to how far photography had progressed during the 30 years since its origins.

This year marks the 150th

anniversary of the first discoveries which led to the establishment of photography as a science and art. The international celebrations were launched in London in January with a gala dinner at the Savoy Hotel, a celebration closer to the banquet in the old Christchurch Town Hall in 1868 than the first tentative steps to establish the photographic process.

In 1939, William Henry Fox Talbot had taken the first known photographic negative, a postage stamp-sized image of a latticed window in his Wiltshire home.

The negative contained the delicacy and detail of an engraving, but compared with the character of Gourlay’s photograph it was coldly static.

Using the collodion technique

originated by an English sculptor, Frederick Scott Archer, the Christchurch photographer captured colonial New Zealanders off-guard. The result is a delightfully Trollopian image of midVictorian society — the clergyman leaning back to concentrate on the speeches from the top table, while his wife immerses her nose in a large posy of flowers.

Behind them, two attractive young ladies in white are obviously more interested in the camera, while their chaperone maintains a careful watch over proceedings. Other heads are bowed over tables laden with victuals and wine bottles. The bottom of the photograph is a frieze of smart bonnets and paisley shawls. On one collodion plate, Gourlay has trapped a moment in time and created a memorable image. For the colonists, photography must have seemed a miracle. For today’s descendants the camera has become commonplace. Lives, images and surroundings are captured with the latest computerised, electroni-cally-controlled technological marvel.

Together with the motor car, electric light and birth control, photography emerged as one of the movers and shakers of the twentieth century. During the last 150 years, it has conveyed images of the great and the infamous, the world’s triumphs and defeats, tragedies and joys. The camera has delighted, and repelled, trapping images of time which have outraged, fascinated, mesmerised and saddened us all. A single click of a shutter can immortalise birth and death, a sunrise, or the assassination of a world leader. The camera has fulfilled the dream of trapping time forever, stopping events in a single frozen image. Photography began with a honeymoon in the Northern Italian lake district. William Fox Talbot and his new wife, Constance, spent five months among the lakes and mountains, walking, sightseeing and sketching the scenery. Constance was an accomplished amateur artist. William was not (he once described his sketches as “melancholy to behold”) He employed a device called a camera lucida to project an image onto a ground glass screen. For the completely unartistic, the image could be thrown onto thin paper for tracing.

At some stage, Fox Talbot began to theorise about how the image could be fixed permanently. The Member of Parliament for Chippenham possessed an inate scientific genius and continued to explore the idea when he returned to his Wiltshire home, Lacock Abbey.

He was not the first to investigate the possibility. In 1802, Thomas Wedgwood had experimented with the use of silver salts to produce patterns for the Wedgwood family’s ceramic wares. While he managed to produce an image, a chemical reaction prevented him from fixing it. While the principle of the camera had been originally discovered by Islamic astronomers, the concept of using a chemical formula to trap images permanently was definitely a new idea. The Royal Institution considered Wedgewood’s experiments, while across the Channel, the French (notably Niepce and Daguerre) were following identical ideas. Daguerre, through a combinaton of good luck and dogged perserverance, eventually discovered the secret of capturing and fixing an image onto a chemi-cally-coated metal plate. The daguerreotype was born.

Meanwhile, at Lucock Abbey, Fox Talbot was slowly and methodically experimenting with silver salt. In 1834, he left a sheet of coated paper in the sun in contact with a leaf. The resulting image was a delicate silvery “photographic drawing.” Five years later, his estate carpeter built a simple wooden box fitted with a lens and coated paper. Pointing the cumbersome device at a sunlit window, Fox Talbot took the world’s first known photographic negative. The modest lattice window had become a postage stamp-sized piece of world history. “From today, painting is dead,” the artist Delaroche exclaimed. He was wrong, but photography was soon sweeping through the smartest circles. The daguerreotype was eventually superceded by Fox Talbot’s technique which involved negatives and any number of prints rather than one single plate. But photography would continue to pass through a process of refinement and improvement.

Fox Talbot’s paper required exceptionally long exposures and

the brightest of sunlight before, in 1840, that “exciting fluid” — a mixture of silver nitrate and gallic acid — made the paper negative highly sensitive, reducing exposure times to a few seconds even in overcast conditions. Fox Talbot then discovered that the image could be fixed permanently on paper by soaking it in a strong salt solution. Photography was up and running, patronised by royalty and lionised by an increasingly affluent middle anxious to enjoy an exciting novelty. In May, 1857, barely 20 years after Fox Talbot launched his revolutionary technique on to the world, the “Lyttelton Times” reported that “photgraphy has broken out like an epidemic amongst us. Quite unknown in the place a year ago, we now have a professional artist well known in the northern provinces and another on the point of coming, two students practising the art and, we believe, one amateur. Canterbury will now be able to look itself straight in the face ...”

Canterbury’s first recorded photographer pre-dated the “photographic epidemic” James McCardell arrived at Lyttelton on board the Castle Eden in February, 1851. An artistic, musical man, McCardell’s mournful eyes and fashionable waistcoat stare from his photograph. By early 1857, he obviously felt confident enough of his own photographic talent to advertise in the “Lyttelton Times.” But it was a short-lived career, and none of his photographs appear to have survived. Canterbury’s pioneer photographers were able to use the new collodian process, the wet plate method invented in 1851 by Frederick Scott Archer, an English sculptor. The colonial Victorian photographer faced a lengthy process before he could show the final photograph to the customer.

Collodion was made by dissolving gun cotton or pyroxyline in a mixture of ether or alcohol and spread carefully over a sheet of glass to form a thin film. The plate was then sensitised by placing it face down in a bath of silver nitrate.

The wet plate had to be exposed, developed and fixed before the emulsion dried, allowing the photographer between 30 and 40 minutes to complete the project. Photographers in the field developed various styles of portable darkroom, including a folding table complete with fitted calico bag which enclosed the photographer’s head and arms.

For trips into the back country, mackintosh tents were carried by pack horse, or darkrooms provided by the owners of the hotels and coaching inns. Given the challenges of transportation in the Canterbury settlement, the early photographers displayed considerable initiative and determination. In 1869, Edward Percival Sealy braved rockfalls, the weather and South Island sandflies to photograph Mt Cook and the Tasman Glacier. He later travelled to Mesopotamia Station, pho-

tographing a group of settlers dressed in white linen and best suits, lounging in front of the station buildings.

In the background, an infinity of tussockland and mountains stamps the poignant cluster of buildings and figures on the mind’s eye as an image of New Zealand’s isolated but undismayed colonial past. Then there was the übiquitous Alfred Charles Barker — doctor, Victorian paterfamilias and pioneer photographer. Dr Barker seems to have been a compulsive photographer. The Canterbury Museum currently holds 387 of his wet plate negatives, several albums and a large collection of albumen prints. He must have become a familiar figure as he leaned out of windows or clambered round rooftops capturing the gradual spread of a new city across the plains and marshlands. His pictures show the rawness and energy of a new society suffering from a photographic epidemic. Photography has grasped the imaginations and enthusiam of the Canterbury settlers a few decades after Fox Talbot dreamed of a scientific method to trap images forever. By 1880, the collodion method had been replaced by the dry plate.

Cameras became smaller and increasingly simple to use. But the romance of those first four decades of photography never quite vanished. Like Henry Gourlay’s image of mid-Victorian Canterbury, the early face of photography is an enduring one.