A vintage nineteenth-century photograph of Adelaide, taken from the Post Office Tower looking towards North Adelaide
An albumen paper photograph (159 × 205 mm); tiny quarter-round indentations to the bottom corners (a legacy of having been tipped in on a mount at some stage); slight fading around the edges; now unmounted and in excellent condition.
The photograph shows the eastern side of a fairly quiet King William Street; the clockless tower of the Town Hall has a prominent position to the right of the image. 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').
Item #127212
Price (AUD):
$300.00