by For almost a century, thousands of Fairfax employees handed the granular photo of a strict gentleman on a horse, a picturesque, looking box that was strapped on his chest every day. The image of George Bell from 1910-all-Undergel community, as Australia’s first press photographer, supervised the daily hustle and bustle of one of the country’s largest media empires, editor of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Australian financial review, the Canberra Times, the Sun Heralds and a variety of rural and regional publications.
When Fairfax left his premises of Jones Street in Sydney in the 1990s, George also went in the Slick New Building corridors in the Sussex Street and again when the company moved to Pyrmont in 2007.
When the Guardian contacted nine at the beginning of this week, nobody could say what happened to George since the network acquired Fairfax six years ago. But for the experienced photographer Mike Bowers, who worked for more than a quarter of a century at Fairfax, and for another 12 years with this publication, the photo of George Bell has remained a permanent image throughout his career – just as the challenges of his career.
When Bowers played a curatorial role last year and put together the National Library of Australia’s Fit to printing: moments in the Fairfax photo archive exhibition that opened this week in Canberra, George Bell was his starting point.
“I always asked myself how he did it to deal with the city on horseback, and I mean, look at the size of this camera.”
And then there were the glass panels that were needed for each picture. Although Kodak presented his first Brownie with 117 roll film in 1900, professional photography would use glass plates for several decades. Fragile weighty objects that coated in an emulsion of gelatin, potassium bromide and silver nitrate in minimum minimum minimum and up to six had to be transferred a certain job.
How did he do that?
In 2012, Fairfax donated 18,000 negative for glass ships and covered the period from 1890 to 1948 to the archives of the National Library. When Bowers dragged through the collection, he landed on the negative of George Bell -Image. The photo that Bowers had been nodding a day for more than two decades. In the negative, two horses attached to a car can be seen in the far left background. Australia’s first press photographers relied on a small team to do their job.
Some of the pictures in the exhibition for Fit to Print have been completed for more than a century. And most have never been displayed in their full format. Photography as a medium was not tailored to the newspaper public. In most original prints, either 16×20 or 16×24 inches were admired on walls, not to newspaper.
The exhibition captures the earliest forms of paparazzi, which are achieved without exception by the cooperation of the targeted celebrities. Before the commercial aviation, Sea was the only way in Australia, and the goal to Sydney was North Head. Boaten ordered the newspapers of the day to travel to the arriving ships and take the first pictures of Royals, remarkable visitors in the arts, sciences, sport and politics as well as international sensations such as Anna Pavlova and Harry Houdini.
The motifs pose on deck and are dressed in their best clothing, ready for the cameras. That was just as good, because the photo journalists of the day had trained in the big photo studios in the big photo studios in most years, and that was the style they had brought to the media. The subjects were arranged in position and obliged to keep the pose in the pleasure of the photographer.
With cameras who are able to keep only a negative at the same time, and the photographer limited to the number of glass signs they could wear, every shot had to play a role, and it had to be staged carefully to transmit the message of history.
“It was a fairly stilted approach to photography,” says Bowers. “It had to be completely set up so that many of these pictures look almost mangly.”
He turns to a picture of a platform scene, a wounded soldier who celebrates a recruit.
While the modern eye could assume that the photographer recorded a fleeting patriotic image in a second second, the scene from pure propaganda reasons is staged.
Another shows Australian soldiers in the First World War, who sneak through a jungle, ready for weapons, the enemy may be preceded immediately. The picture was taken during the training and the test subjects had been asked to freeze from the middle of the maneuvre for the exposure of half a second.
When Herbert Henry Fishwick, one of Fairfax’s most productive photographers in the early 20th century, became the national passion of Australia, one of Fairfax’s most productive photographers, of the inability of photography, the emotions on the cricket-tone height from the media pit far outside the field. He wrote to an optical lens company in England that made telescopes and commissioned a particularly long lens – about 1.2 meters long. Fishwick used the lens for the first time during the Ashes tour from 1920-1921, and Bowers believed that this was marked for the first time that a telephoto lens was used all over the world.
“He needed both hands to argue, but the pictures were of such a quality that the entire English tour team ordered pictures of themselves, they had never seen anything like this. And when these photos reached England, newspapers sent people out to see how it was done.
“I think the birth of long -litter photography can be attributed to the Morning Herald in Sydney.”
In 1923, construction started on the Sydney Harbor Bridge. Bowers believes that the photographers who have documented their almost decades of construction have also made a visual schedule available for the significant jumps of technology photography this decade.
“At the beginning of the construction, you have the old technology when the arches that you have really good shutters meet that start to freeze action. And they have emulsions that get much faster.
You can see that pictures are no longer furnished, they simply came along and the workers photographed in action.
“In many ways, the bridge and other projects like this have contributed to developing the recognizable type of photojournalistic style that we use today.”
The image of the fascist gateecrashing -Francis de Groot, who swings high seconds with his sword, before he cut off the ligaments at the opening ceremony of the bridge in 1932, is one of the legendary images of the Australian 20th century.
Neither this picture – nor one of the others that were captured by de Groot would have been possible a decade before if it had been seen as the most modern photographic technology in 1923 as innovative photographic technology.
In the age of the smartphone, it seems that everyone today is a photographer. There are no more newspapers that rely on urgent photographers at the place of a sudden major event, crime or a disaster in order to record in pictures, which took place before the end. Members of the public who are caught in the middle of everything will do so for them.
“But good photography is still a good photography and will always bubble on the surface,” says Bowers.
When he assessed the recent photographs in New Zealand, he believes that he has noticed a deterioration in the skills such as processing, the ability to recognize and tailor a shot within a shot.
‘There is a deterioration in the nuts and bolts of everything … and I think that comes from the fact that we now have a generation of photographers who have never been to a darkroom.
If you are in a darkroom, move the easel around, you change the height of it, you see where the actual picture is located.
“And now it’s all gone.”
