SWEET, Captain Samuel White

A vintage full-plate albumen paper photograph (160 × 207 mm) of a large group of Narrinyeri [Ngarrindjeri] at Point McLeay, Lake Alexandrina, South Australia [late 1870s]

Unmounted as issued; in fine condition. The frontispiece of George Taplin's 'The Folklore, Manners, Customs, and Languages of the South Australian Aborigines' (1879) is a mounted original photograph captioned 'A Camp of the Narrinyeri, Lake Alexandrina'; it is a familiar view, not least because of its publication in this book. The photograph offered here is very rare by comparison, yet it would appear to have been taken only a little further along the shoreline of the lake, probably on the same occasion. 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').

Item #63268

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