Aboriginal camp, Point McLeay, South Australia, 1880

A$1,200 · Offered by Douglas Stewart Fine Books

Albumen print photograph, 170 x 210 mm, mounted on a contemporary album page of thick card, inscribed in negative at lower left Sweet Adelaide 455 , a very strong print in excellent condition with rich tonal range, small section of loss to surface of the paper at right edge. The National Library of Australia s copy of this, one of Captain Sweet s best known photographs of Aborigines, is captioned Blacks whurlie . Although the NLA dates their copy to 1870, the photograph was in fact one of a highly successful series of portraits of Ngarrindjeri people Captain Sweet took in and around the Point McLeay mission late in 1880: Sweet s number scratched into the negative shows it is from the same sequence of photographs as the celebrated individual portraits of a man in a possum skin cloak and a woman in a possum skin cloak carrying her baby. (See the short essay by Philip Jones in A century in focus : South Australian photography 1840s-1940s, edited by Julie Robinson and Maria Zagala, Adelaide : Art Gallery of South Australia, 2007, p 116).

• Binding: Hardcover

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