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April 23, 2012
Captain (Samuel White) Sweet makes occasional appearances in Gael Newton's standard reference work on the history of Australian photography, Shades of Light: Photography and Australia1838-1988.
She says that the collodiotype had facilitated the rise of the views trade to such an extent that by the mid 1860s some photographers like Captain Sweet in Adelaide could advertise as specialist landscape photographers. In Expeditions, Excursions and Expositions chapter she says that in:
1870 Sweet was commissioned to supply the northern construction teams racing to complete, on schedule, the British-Australian overland telegraph link from Darwin to Port Adelaide. His views of the men and camps, and the ceremony of laying the first telegraph pole in Port Darwin, are the only records of a momentous leap in Australia's communication with the world.His finely composed, large, well-printed images of the new settlement in the north were encouraging to those who still hoped that settlement would one day cover the continent, and the pictures of the electrical umbilical cord connecting Australia with Europe were a promise of the future
Sweet had a studio in Adelaide from 1866 to 1886 and he photographed the growth of the city of Adelaide:
Samuel White Sweet, Bank of S.A., Adelaide, NLA
Newton says that the late work of Captain Sweet the photographs of the early 1880s-- have both complex arrangements of figures and machinery and also a formal signature of novel angles, diagonals and interests in linear patterns.
Samuel White Sweet, Deaf Dumb & Blind Asylum, Adelaide, gelatin silver NLA
Newton adds that a heightened awareness of the photograph as a pictorial entity is evident in the work of the best view photographers of the period. As a consequence of this instinctive or conscious recognition of the difference between reality and its photographic representation, the personal styles, and even personalities, of many photographers in the 1880s are more evident than during the pioneer generations.
Samuel White Sweet,King William St, Adelaide [showing Hall's Southern Cross Hotel, the Imperial and various shops, horse and buggy and tram] , gelatin silver, NLA
So we have a sensitivity to the photograph as a picture in its own right in addition to the traditional topographical role of the view photograph. What that role is is unclear. What topographics is in the Australian context is not made explicit. Does it mean objective, scrupulous and documental descriptions or urban life with large format cameras? Does it imply a particular interpretation of this urban views?
And that's pretty much it. Pictorialism emerges in Adelaide in 1897 with John Kauffmann. A new chapter.
If we tarry a while on topographics can we say that Eugène Atget and Walker Evans, who examined and documented the built, vernacular landscape, the former in Paris at the turn of the 20th century and the latter in Depression-era America, are a continuation of the topographic photographic tradition? What is a topographic photograph? How is it different from trade views?
What is 19th and 20th century topographic photography? What would contemporary topographic interpretations of 21st century Adelaide look like?
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