Photographic Views of Adelaide, South Australia. Series II
Adelaide, E.S. Wigg & Son, [1880s].
Duodecimo (170 × 113 mm), a cased leporello comprising 12 original albumen silver photographs (each approximately 95 × 150 mm) mounted on cards captioned and bordered in red, joined together with cloth hinges.
Red cloth lettered and decorated in gilt, and decorated in black and blind; cover lightly marked, plain spine a little sunned; an excellent copy (the contents are in fine condition).
The views are mainly street scenes and public buildings; all of them are illustrated on our website. Two of the plates are signed in the negative 'Sweet | Adelaide', and the balance of the photographs are almost certainly his work. We have a similar item in blue cloth entitled 'Photographic Views of Adelaide, South Australia. [Series] **'; only two of the images are the same ('Rundle Street & The Arcade', and 'Coast Natives' Wurlie'). Captain Samuel White Sweet (1825-1886) was a sea captain, surveyor and photographer: after he was censured when his ship ran aground in 1875, he 'retired from the sea, opened a photographic studio in Adelaide and concentrated on landscapes. With his horse-drawn dark room he travelled through South Australia taking hundreds of skilful pictures of the outback, stations and homesteads. The colony's foremost documentary photographer of the 1870s, in the early 1880s he was one of the first to use the new dry-plate process' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). 'Coast Natives' Wurlie' was clearly taken at the same time as the scene in the frontispiece to Taplin's 'The Folklore, Manners, Customs, and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines', published in 1879, and illustrated with original photographs by Samuel Sweet.
Item #108150
Price (AUD):
$800.00