Holtermann Collection Digitisation Project - curatorial

The way they were

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:52:46 +1100

One of the great things about the American and Australasian Photographic Company’s images of Hill End and Gulgong is that the people in the streets generally appear dressed as they were in their day-to-day lives. There are exceptions, mainly when individuals are photographed outside of their own home, wearing their best clothes and posing as a couple or family for the camera. This is not surprising, as the A & A Company's method of operation was to advertise their intention to photograph in the next day or two.

But there is one instance in which a direct comparison can be made of daywear and formal attire and that is found in negative numbers 18146 and 18220, both of which show Mr Daniel Doherty’s boot store in Gulgong. In the first photograph we see Daniel Doherty, hand on hip, standing with his work associates and hangers-on in their work clothes. We also see a small black dog at the lower right of frame.

Negative no. 18146 showing Daniel Doherty's boot store with casually dressed staff.

There seems nothing unusual about this image until we view negative 18220. In this photograph we once again see Daniel Doherty (holding his daughter’s hand) with associates and hangers-on posing in front of his boot store, except this time all in their best attire. The tallest man is wearing an impressive frock coat, although his dusty shoes belie the formality of his outfit. The boot-maker with the bib apron in the first image is now on the right wearing a fancy shirt and coat. He later appears as manager of Doherty’s branch store in Home Rule, negative no. 18450 (see left). Rising to the occasion, the little black dog from the last photograph even performs a trick for the camera!

Negative no. 18220 showing Daniel Doherty's boot store with formally dressed staff.

From the negative numbers 18146 and 18220 we can see that the photographs would have only been taken a day or two apart, as we know that the A & A photographers could take 70-100 photos in a day's work. This implies that Daniel Doherty may have requested that the photographers return the next day to re-photograph him and his staff in their best attire – a most interesting and unusual event in the A&A negatives collection!

Words and research by Alan Davies.

A Hill End mystery solved

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 10:53:48 +1100

As well as the wet plate negatives taken by the American and Australasian Photographic Co, the Library has many original cartes-de-visite prints that were made from them in 1872-3. Most have the company’s stamp and number on the back and are quickly identified.

However, one carte taken in Hill End had a blank back. It was clearly taken at the same place and time as Holtermann negative 18830, but seemed mediocre in comparison. When it was donated in 1958, librarians noted the similarity, but also realised there was no corresponding negative.

Mystery carte-de-visite (left) alongside Holtermann negative 18830 (right).

The carte depicted a horse-drawn dray bogged in Clarke Street and the appalling condition of the street in the winter of 1872 which led to the incident described in Harry Hodge’s seminal work on Hill End, The Hill End Story – Book 1 p59, together with an image from Holtermann negative 18848.

“The road directly in front of it [William Meare’s Criterion Store] covered an alluvial test hole sunk by some earlier prospector and this hole subsided in the wet winter of 1872 to form the bog shown below.”

Holtermann negative 18848 published in H. Hodge's The Hill End Story.

A more accurate date and authorship of the mystery carte can be deduced from an article in the Sydney Morning Herald 12 September 1872.

“Clark-street, as I have before stated, is muddy; the houses on each side are packed close, therefore the centre of the street which has a gentle slope to the hill is made the drain. A chain of muddy lagoons extend from end to end and the pedestrian often feels sorely puzzled to find a crossing-place at any part of it. At night time it is peculiarly perplexing, and taking a view from the balcony of one of the hotels, the spectator would imagine so many “will of the wisps” were flitting throughout the streets as the inhabitants with lanterns trudge through from point to point. A new arrival is apt for the first day or so to respect the polish of his boots, and take a few circuits to reach particular points, but the feeling soon wears off, and in a short time he takes the puddles as a matter of course, never heeding the appearance of his extremities.

One can find interesting studies even in mud; the photographic artists have; and I was favoured by two cartes by the local artists, the A. A. Company and Mr Pike, giving two scenes in Clark-street; they are studies in their way. One represents a horse being pulled out of a mud-hole, the other a dray bogged. These little episodes occurred a few days before my arrival; but they fade in comparison with one I saw last Sunday. A drunken man had by some means floundered into one of the favourite spots, fell, and was completely covered in the puddle. The spectators of course, had to pull him out –not an easy matter. After three ineffectual attempts with a long slab, at length the unfortunate one was rescued from his muddy position, and presented the appearance of a model enveloped by a clayey mould for casting purposes. The model was removed to the lock-up, stripped and a blanket supplied him by some obliging constable. Sights like this, I was informed, are frequent. The wonder is how poor foolish inebriates escape being smothered, for many drunken ones can be seen staggering about the street at nightfall.”

Mr Pike is clearly Alexander Pyke of photographers Pyke and Moss. The edge of the tent studio of Pyke and Moss, which stood between two tobacconists on the eastern side of Clarke Street, can be seen in Holtermann neg 18636 (left).

In fact, examples of Pyke and Moss’s cartes are visible in frames nailed to the verandah post and front of L H Hart’s store in neg 18736 (below).

Research and words by Alan Davies.

Hand made homes

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 17:00:18 +1100

The gold rush was a time of opportunism when people came from far and wide to stake their claim. Upon arrival the dreams of riches would give way to the reality of the harsh conditions on the goldfields and the necessity of housing.

In the beginning, many miners erected tents or open bark-shelters - a fast, cheap and portable way to live. Some merchants even made a livelihood from selling tents on the fields.

Those who stayed longer and brought their families along sometimes built their own homes made from materials found in the local area. The most common of these was the wattle and daub house - a method of building dating back to Anglo Saxon times.

American adventurer Gus Peirce arrived in Hill End in 1871. He described the process of wattle-and-daub construction in his book Knocking About – Being Some Adventures of Augustus Baker Peirce in Australia.

"However, as I had been earning some twelve or fifteen pounds daily in surveying and draughting the various mining claims about me, I decided to remain. I built a three-room wattle-and-daub house and sent for my family.

This house was constructed in regulation style, without sills, by simply driving saplings into the ground at regular intervals, on either side of which were fastened the wattles or split limbs, forming horizontal half-rounds, the space between them being filled in solid with a mixture of earth, water, and grass. The roof was made of saplings and gum bark, and a chimney erected of slabs and finished with a barrel. A trench was then dug around the hut to drain off the water, and the new residence was complete. For interior decoration I used such portions of the Artemus Ward panorama* as had not been water-soaked; Brigham Young** and his numerous progeny gazed down from the bedroom ceiling, keeping watch like guardian angels; and different views of Salt Lake around the walls enlarged the perspectives of the different rooms.

When everything was ready Mrs. Peirce and the children came up from Sydney, and we settled down to domestic life in a dwelling which thousands of cockatoos never allowed to become lonesome."

After eight months, Peirce moved on, selling his house to the local blacksmith.

It has been suggested that the Australian Acacia tree was dubbed Wattle as it provided ideal branches for forming the wattles in this method of housing.

* ‘Artemus Ward’ was U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s favourite author. Gus Peirce had painted a panorama to illustrate one of Ward’s humorous stories.

** Brigham Young was founder of the Latter-day Saints community in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Signs of the times

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 17:17:22 +1100

Since we began digitising the Holtermann negatives to our new standard we have been able to view previously unclear details in the negatives. One of the great benefits of this is that we can now read the small text on posters and signs on the shop fronts and fences of Australia's gold rush towns.

This gives us a great insight into how items – such as wagons, horses and even claims – were traded and sold as well as the travelling shows, community meetings and even members of royalty passing through at the time.

In addition to these small posters we can also find new information on the grand hand-painted shop front signage not previously visible - including the signature of the sign writer himself.

We look forward with interest to the doorways these old posters will potentially open up for historical researchers.

The panoramas emerge

Fri, 04 Sep 2009 12:11:22 +1100

Apart from their well documented house front, store front and goldfield photography, Merlin and Bayliss they were also known for their landscape panoramas.
To capture these 180° views a number of glass plate photographs (usually three or four) had to be taken in succession and the prints trimmed and overlapped to form the illusion of one long, uninterrupted landscape view.

Although most of the panoramas were taken using mammoth plates so that they could be printed in a large exhibition size, we can also find some examples of these panoramas in the smaller quarter plate negatives.

We recently digitised the below four quarter plates and - using digital photo-stitching technology - were able to recreate the full panorama of Gulgong NSW taken from Church Hill in the 1870s.

Below we have an example of what the panorama would have looked like using the traditional print layering method of panorama construction - note that the joins are clearly visible and the areas of vignetting around the edges interrupt the flow of the landscape.

And here is our newly constructed panorama created using the digital intelligence of Photoshop CS4's Photomerge facility along with some manual retouching, dodging and burning - the result is far smoother and gives a clear impression of the view from Church Hill over 100 years ago.

Please take the time to view an enlarged version of the above panorama - it is well worth it!

This digitised panorama has the ability to be enlarged as a high quality photographic print - with no loss of image quality - to five metres in length. With such exciting results from negatives measuring only 3.25x4.25 inches [83x108mm] we look forward with great anticipation to seeing results from the mammoth plate panoramas, ranging in size from 10x12 inches [25x30cm] to 1.6x0.9 metres.

Gun cotton on glass

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 15:25:00 +1100

All the Holtermann negatives were made by the wet-plate process. That is, the glass plates were hand coated with a solution of collodion which contained light sensitive silver salts.

Collodion was a syrupy liquid made by dissolving gun cotton [pyroxylin] in alcohol and ether. Collodion had been used by doctors in the mid 19th century to cover incised wounds. Poured over a cut, the ether and alcohol quickly evaporated, leaving a thin plastic film covering the skin. For photographers, collodion provided a method of coating a glass plate with a clear film of photosensitive material.

Merlin and Bayliss didn't just point a camera and take a photograph. They had to make them and the process was slow. In the confines of a darkroom, they coated each glass plate with a syrupy mixture of collodion containing salt, dunked it in silver nitrate solution to make the plate light sensitive and placed it in the camera. You can actually see where the photographer held the plates between thumb and index finger during the coating of the Holtermann negatives, as shown below.

After an exposure of several seconds or even minutes, the plate was developed without delay, as collodion lost its light sensitivity when dry. This meant that wet-plate photographers like Merlin and Bayliss had to take their darkrooms with them wherever they went, so that they could manufacture and process the negatives, one at a time.

Merlin and Bayliss used a horse to pull their darkroom-on-wheels, which pops up in a number of street scenes in the collection along with the carriage driver.

Sizing up the collection

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 15:10:31 +1100

The Holtermann Collection Digitisation Project is focused mainly on the original glass plate negatives taken by the American & Australasian Photographic Co, although several albums of their 1870s photographs exist at PXA365 and PXD352, as well as more recent prints from all the negatives. Nevertheless, there is great diversity in these glass plate negatives, which we will look at in this week's blog.

The majority of the negatives (approximately 3100) are quarter plate size, approximately 3.25 x 4.25 inches [83x108mm] and were used to create albumen prints known as cartes de visite - a cheap and popular way for photographers to make personal prints available to the masses, usually presented to the client in a small cardboard mount.

The term "quarter plate" comes from the days of the daguerreotype - the prevalent photographic technology before the introduction of the wet-collodion process in 1854. The first metal plates (copper coated with polished silver) manufactured for the daguerreotype were approximately 6.5 x 8.5 inches [165x216mm], known as full plate or whole plate - smaller sizes were measured as a fraction of that full plate size, e.g half plate, quarter plate. As glass plates came into use, they followed this terminology. Even these standard plate sizes varied with collodion negatives as the glass was usually cut by the photographer from larger sheets of glass, as was the case with Merlin and Bayliss.

The collection also contains a range of negatives smaller than whole plate, including some stereographic negatives, but of most interest are several hundred larger plates, ranging from 10 x 12 inches [25x30cm] to 18 x 22 inches [46x56cm]. These larger sizes are known as mammoth plates and are very rare in Australia.

From the 1860s it was possible to enlarge negatives using a solar enlarger, which used a clockwork motor to follow the sun. However the results were usually quite poor and often out-of-focus, so photographers found it better to create big photographs by contact printing huge negatives. Of course, big negatives required big cameras and considerable skill was needed to manipulate the wet plate negatives. These large contact prints are incredibly sharp due to the inherently grainless nature of the collodion emulsion and their direct contact with the albumen paper during exposure.

This is especially true for the largest negatives in the collection - measuring 1.6 x 0.9 metres each - the largest wet plate negatives in the world. The library holds a contact print made from one of these negatives that reveals the clarity and detail captured by Merlin and Bayliss in the 1870s. We will post a more detailed look at the mechanics of exposing and processing these larger-than-mammoth negatives when their digitisation is imminent.

Stay tuned for a look into the wet-collodion process in next week's post.

It's all in the detail

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 12:46:04 +1100

It's been a productive last few weeks on the project. In this time we've agreed upon and implemented a digitisation standard to encompass the entire 3,500 strong collection. We will be posting some more technical details on the process we used to make these important decisions during the next few weeks. For now, let's have a look at the implications of our new high quality digitisation standard in layman's terms.

Part of our decision making process was to create a series of test scans using different scanner settings and file sizes. The results were astounding! Because the Holtermann negatives were created using the wet-collodion or wet plate process they are virtually grain free. In short, this means that their resolution is only limited by the quality of the camera lens the negative was exposed with, so we are able to pick out tiny details in the negative and bring them up clearly. In the picture below of the gold rush town of Gulgong, NSW for example;

This image had previously been batch scanned from the corresponding 35mm copy negative, so we had a basic idea of what was in the image. Unfortunately, details such as text in signs and the items in shop windows were not distinguishable. Until, that is, we rescanned the original glass plate negative on our new scanner. Below is an enlarged section from the original 35mm copy negative scan (left) and our new scan (right) - you can see the amazing difference in detail retention the high quality scan is giving us.

Every word on the poster is clearly visible. Not only that, the costume and accessories of the time - such as the pipe and hats in this image - have become much easier to examine. What fantastic implications for historians and future researchers of the gold rush era in Victoria and New South Wales!

Family historians will also be able to gain an insight to their gold rush ancestors never before possible with clear close up views of those amazing faces available. A great example is this gentleman outside Stafford Henry Barnes' Mudgee Drug Store in Gulgong, NSW;

We would love to hear your thoughts on our progress so far.