A vintage nineteenth-century photograph of a group of men boating on 'Torrens Lake', Adelaide
An albumen paper photograph (158 × 209 mm); tiny quarter-round indentations in each corner (a legacy of having been tipped in on a mount at some stage); short crease and light pencil mark to the top margin; unmounted and in excellent condition.
The photographer's credit and reference number ('Sweet | Adelaide | 344') is scratched in the negative. The background is surely the key to the contemporary viewer's interest: smoke pours from the industrial-scale chimney where the Festival Theatre complex and casino now stand. 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 #127217
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