A vintage photograph of Poonindie Mission Station, 1884 ('Mr Satow taken with the school children outside the Church, Poonindie Mission May 1884')
Original sepia-toned albumen paper photograph (158 × 210 mm), unmounted as issued; in fine condition.
Captain Samuel White Sweet (1825-1886), 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'). 'Sweet | Adelaide | ***' is inscribed in the negative (the three-digit reference number is cropped, but it appears to be 442 or 443); 'Poonindie native mission school' is written in pencil on the verso. The Art Gallery of South Australia and the State Library of Victoria also have an example of this print. There are several differences between all these three examples: they are different enlargements; the AGSA example does not have the photographer's credit in the negative; the SLV example does, but the negative is printed in reverse. 'Captain Sweet's Colonial Imagination - The Ideals of Modernity in South Australian Views Photography, 1866-1886' by Karen Magee (a 2014 University of Adelaide doctoral thesis, accessible online) records that Sweet visited Poonindie in 1884. Magee reproduces the AGSA photograph in her extensive catalogue (see number 820).
Item #141099
Price (AUD):
$2,500.00