John William Lindt (1845–1926), was a German-born Australian landscape and ethnographic photographer, early photojournalist, and portraitist.
Early life and arrival in Australia Johannes Wilhelm Lindt (often referred to in the literature simply as J.W. Lindt, and his name anglicised in Australia as 'John William') was born at Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, son of Peter Joseph Lindt, a customs officer, and his wife Justine, née Rambach.
At 17 he took a working passage to Australia on a Dutch sailing ship which he left at Port Melbourne (Frost and Boddington,Jennie Boddington (1975) J. W. Lindt, photographer (1845–1926) Art Bulletin of Victoria, #16 basing their accounts on Cato, incorrectly have him disembarking—even 'deserting'—his ship at Brisbane). Taking up work as an itinerant piano-tuner, he traveled amongst towns in Victoria and New South Wales before settling in Grafton in 1863 where he became assistant and apprentice to photographer Conrad Wagner (c.1818- 1910).
Photographer After a brief return to Germany in 1867 Lindt took over management of Wagner's studio in 1869. He married Wagner's daughter, Anna on 13 January 1872 and in March 1873 moved the studio into more luxurious premises in Prince Street. There, he advertised 'Portraits in any size and style of the Art, equal to Sydney Houses. Large instantaneous pictures of horses and cattle'. Between 1870 and 1873 he made township views, scenes of mining and group portraits.Ken Orchard, Lindt, John William (1845-1926), in Mateship features as a theme amongst his images of teams of bush workers.
Indigenous subjects
Over c.1873-1874, using the slow and laborious wet-plate collodion process Lindt produced photographs of the local indigenous people both in their environment conducting actual traditional ceremonies in the Clarence River district, and in his studio. In the latter, the subjects, set in elaborate recreations of natural environment, clothed traditionally, and surrounded by implements, are the more compositionally controlled because Lindt was able to prepare and process his plates with the necessary complex chemistry close at hand in his darkrooms. His prints were contact-printed from huge 20 x 16 inch (50.8 cm x 40.64 cm) wet plate negatives. Twelve of this series is included his 1874 album Australian Aboriginals.'Books, Stationery and Music, Australian Aboriginal Album,' The Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday, 31 Dec 1874, p.8 Also during his Grafton years, from 1869 to 1876, Lindt produced Australian Types (c.1873-1874); and Characteristic Australian Scenery (1875) commissioned by the New South Wales Government for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. The albums include fastidiously composed and exposed images such as The Artist's Camp (Near Wintervale) (1875) and Tower Hill Creek, N.S.W. (1875) each meticulously printed, qualities he maintained in his imagery henceforth.
Contemporary commentary records the aboriginal studio portraits as "the first successful attempt at representing the native blacks truthfully as well as artistically."Australian Town and Country Journal 5 December 1874, p.21 The Sydney Morning Herald, of 24 November 1874 expanded on what made the photographs attractive to Europeans;
The report clearly sets out a cynical nostalgia for the traditional ways of these people which is made sentimental by noting their 'decreasing numbers' as their country was cleared by loggers, expressing a common attitude amongst the colonists that the indigenous populations were doomed. Several of the individuals in Lindt's group portraits were identified in an article in the Grafton Argus covering the occasion of his departure to Sydney on the paddle steamer Agnes Irving where he was to publish his album of "12 views 6 inches by 8 inches, mounted upon tinted cardboard, 12 x 10 inches, the whole to be arranged in portfolio wrapping...which when bound up would form a suitable present for friends in England and other parts." The Argus article gives descriptions of each image, for example;
In the album as published, in its presentation in exhibitions in Philadelphia, Calcutta and Amsterdam and in subsequent mechanical reprinting in the 1880s the captions, and thus identities, were omitted, and the subjects' clans and languages (Gumbaynggirr and Bandjalung), are not named and in other reproductions titles even incorrectly represent the subjects as being from 'Victoria' or elsewhere. The studio scenery and backdrops, while elaborate, are generic with little reference to the actual homelands of the people depicted. In recent times with the cooperation of the Grafton Regional Gallery, the subjects' identities are being traced by descendant Shauna Bostock-Smith, researcher Annika Korsgaard and others.
Despite their constructed nature and depiction of what was then (incorrectly) perceived as a vanishing culture, Lindt's Aboriginal tableaux were so highly regarded as scientific records when they were made that they were purchased by the New South Wales government for presentation to 'various scientific institutions in the old country'. Several were sent in 1875 to Italian Darwinist Enrico Giglioli. The current identities of such institutions, the Museum of Mankind, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Commonwealth Society (in London) and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, all retain copies, and one set, now held in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, was acquired by Von Hégel on his 1874-77 visit to the South Pacific.
Melbourne Lindt moved to Melbourne in 1876 where he worked for Batchelder & Co. before opening his own opulent studios at number 7 at the top of Collins Street opposite the Treasury, in 1877. His cartes-de-visite had printed "J. W. Lindt, Photographer, Prize Medallist Philadelphia, Sydney, Brisbane, Paris, 7 Collins Street, Melbourne" on the back. At a time of great wealth in Melbourne lavishly appointed studios were a sign of the rising status of photography in Australia, as elsewhere, and Lindt's studio was a prime example; his apprentice Herman Carl Krutli, who first visited within its third year remembered the 'rich crimson velvet pile carpet of the reception room' and posing for Lindt's first dry plate exposure in 1880. Lindt's business of this period was wide-ranging, and included portraits, records of Melbourne public buildings and streetscapes, the Botanical Gardens, and Port Melbourne. Tall and prepossessing,‘The great Lindt’, Australasian Photo-Review, July, Aug 1952 Lindt is remembered in 1955 by Jack Cato in this colourful description in his The Story of the Camera in Australia:
He was a welcome photographer of members of parliament and other Melbourne personalities, their society and cultural life including the theatre, and was known as a 'rich man's photographer' for those whose families he grouped informally on the lawns in front of their mansions, with servants at the rails of the upstairs balconies. He continued with landscape, producing folios Fernshaw and Watt River Scenery, Victoria ( c.1878-82), Scenery on the Ovens and Buckland Rivers, Victoria (c.1878–82) and Lorne, Louttit Bay and Cape Otway Ranges (1883). Sales of his Black Spur scenery amounted to approximately 25,000 copies printed from the original negatives between 1882 and 1892.
In June 1880 a Melbourne newspaper commissioned Lindt to document the capture of the notorious bush-rangers, the Kelly gang in Glenrowan, Victoria. Arriving after the event, Lindt produced a wet plate image Body of Joe Byrne, member of the Kelly gang, hung up for photography, outside the Benalla lock-up. His panoramic image, made on 29 June, encompasses the Victorian government photographer A.W. Burman (son of William Insull Burman ), the artist Julian Ashton sketching Byrne's body for the Illustrated Sydney News, with casual bystanders. It is amongst his most famous images and has been hailed as the earliest press photograph taken in Australia.
During the early 1880s Lindt contemplated exchanging his career from photographer to photographic supplier, after his return abroad the Liguria on 31 August 1881 from visiting Europe to source the latest photographic equipment,"Later English and Cape News: Adelaide 31st August", in The Age Thursday, 1 Sep 1881, Page 3 Lindt became sole Australian agent for numerous studio suppliers, including Enholtz's scenic backgrounds. Thus keeping abreast of developments in the medium, from about 1881 he was using the recently introduced Voigtländer Euryscope lenses on his Haake & Albers' studio cameras, and to produce enlargements. He quickly adopted the commercial dry plates which he ordered from England soon after they became commercially available. An accomplished technician, he readily adapted and invented equipment to suit his needs. From 1884 operated a second studio installed behind his newly acquired estate; 'Ethelred' in Hawthorn, in order to accommodate the high demand for his work.
New Guinea
A keen ethnographer of the nineteenth-century persuasion, in 1885 Lindt joined Major-General Sir Peter Scratchley, superintendent of coastal defences, in an expedition from Sydney on the Governor Blackall to the newly proclaimed Protectorate of British New Guinea. As its official photographer, his first journey was up the Laloki River as far as the Rano Falls to the native villages at Sadara and Makara, then he made pictures of a lakatois on Port Moresby harbour, before venturing into the Owen Stanley Range, at night processing his plates by the light of a hurricane lamp wrapped in red trade cloth. Receiving news that his wife was ill, they returned, but Sir Peter Scratchley died of fever on the return journey.
Lindt produced several hundred dry plate negatives of tribal life, and the resultant album was shown at the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London in 1886. During a visit to the optical institutions and manufacturers which he represented commercially, Lindt secured a publisher for fifty of these pictures in Picturesque New Guinea (London, 1887) which, printed in a new autotype process, took full commercial advantage of the advent of half-tone printing. By this means, the 1880s photographs by Lindt were the earliest from PNG to be seen by a wider audience, which enhanced his reputation as a photographer. Hasselberg and Quanchi note that Lindt's iconic images, such as the water-carrier, lakotoi sailing canoe and the tree houses, became exemplars imitated by photographers who followed.
In the next year, he was honoured with appointment as a Fellow in the Royal Geographical Society. In 1888 The Argus praised the quality of this work: "It has often been a matter of discussion how far, or whether at all photography may be considered a fine art. By the work of J. W. Lindt this question is decided in a way that is a triumph for his profession.The Argus 27 November 1888
Collins Street studio In 1889 Lindt moved his studio to 177 Collins Street and on 10 July 1889 he married his retoucher Catherine Elizabeth Cousens after the death, on 27 May 1888, of his first wife in giving birth to a stillborn.