Fit to Print: Curator's essay | National Library of Australia (NLA)

Fit to Print: Curator's essay

Written by Mike Bowers

At its very best photojournalism can define a moment, a movement, an era or even a whole generation. It can bring down a careless politician or elevate them to a winning position. It can lift a weary sprit. And sometimes it can move opinions and change the way we view the world.

For the photojournalist a whole day, or sometimes many months of dedicated work, can come down to just 1/500th of a second. Once taken, the photograph becomes part of our history. Its latent power, however, is not unleashed until it is published or, as in this selection, curated for you to see and enjoy. Many of the images shown here are more than 100 years old and exemplify the birth of our profession.

I’m often asked about ‘luck’ in photojournalism. There is, of course, always an element of chance in any job that you undertake. However, being in the right place at the right time, with the right lens and camera settings to capture a photograph, is not about luck; it’s about training, experience, instinct and drive — the drive to secure a photograph that is going to elicit a human response, one that will unleash the latent potential of what you see and that will enable you to share that captured history with the world. But I have always believed that you make your own luck in photojournalism. As one of my mentors told me many years ago, ‘f/8 and be there, Mike’ (that is to say, while camera settings are important, the act of bearing witness to the moment unfolding is the key issue).

Early on, the appetite for illustrations in print publications grew slowly. The photograph’s forerunner was imagery reproduced from wood-block engravings. As with many innovations in this field, the first illustrations were driven by commercial imperatives; they were often used, for example, to make a business’s advertisement stand out from those of its competitors. The first example of this appeared in The Sydney Herald in April 1834: it was a simple filled-in line drawing of one of Mrs Hordern’s high-brimmed bonnets above the heading ‘Bargains in Bonnets’. This was five years before the invention of the first true photographic process, the daguerreotype, which was unveiled in August 1839. This bonnet signalled the beginning of the reign of the wood-block engraver in Australian newspaper illustration. As the appetite for more complex illustrations grew, whole teams of engravers would sometimes be employed on a single work of art. The results were sometimes strikingly beautiful.

The 1888 celebrations for the centenary of the arrival of the First Fleet produced one of the finest examples of a woodblock illustration: artist A. Henry Fullwood’s ‘aerial view‘ of Sydney made up of 112 sections. However, this same year also saw the beginning of the end for the wood-block reproduction with the introduction of one of the greatest innovations in newspaper illustration, the halftone reproduction process. In October The Sydney Mail ran a halftone photograph of a group of Parsee (Parsi) cricketers then on a three-mouth tour of England. And in 1892 it published the finish of two Randwick horse races, highlighting not only Australia’s fascination with sport, but also how the need to capture its excitement was driving photographic innovation and technology — as indeed it continues to do to this day.

However, photojournalism did not leap into the world fully formed in the way we understand it today. The early newspaper photographers were recruited from the large photographic studios of the day.

The first Fairfax photographer was George Bell. The Sydney Morning Herald has occupied various buildings over the years, but always with the portrait of Bell, sitting astride his horse, looking down on from the walls of first the darkrooms and later, as digital photography took over, the scanning and computer rooms.

Bell learnt his trade at Kerry and Company, one of the big photographic studios of the day. In the days before photographs could be reproduced in newspapers and magazines, many prosperous families would purchase a book of ‘scenes’: postcards selected and collated to serve as a form of visual entertainment. By 1903 the Kerry studio had a selection of postcards that numbered more than 50,000.

Bell travelled around Australia on horseback at a time when photography was a cumbersome and complicated art. The professional photographer’s gear was heavy and unwieldy, with large cameras that took negatives with emulsions coated on glass plates. I have often wondered how Bell managed this feat on a single horse. But if you look closely on the edge of the portrait of him on his horse, you can see a horse team parked at the edge of the frame — perhaps this was a support wagon containing the equipment he needed, such as the glass plates, tripod, and so on.

Black and white photo of a man with a large camera around his neck, sitting on a horse

Fairfax Corporation, Mr George Bell a photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald seated on a horse with a camera, New South Wales, 1910, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-163385448

Fairfax Corporation, Mr George Bell a photographer for the Sydney Morning Herald seated on a horse with a camera, New South Wales, 1910, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-163385448

The Sydney Mail was a weekly publication filled with news reports from its sister publication, The Sydney Morning Herald. By the look of its extensive agricultural advertising, it was intended mainly for a rural audience. A decade after The Sydney Mail had begun reproducing photographs in its pages, a simple accountant’s note records the employment of George Bell in the ‘process department’ in 1898. But Bell’s images had probably been used for many years prior to his formal employment, as many of the process department’s woodblock engravers would likely have based their illustrations on photographs taken by people such as Bell.

Many of Bell’s early photographs are very stylised. Some of his subjects look quite stiff, almost mannequin-like and set up in scenes as if they were part of some museum display. This formal style reflected the slow emulsion speeds, cumbersome cameras and limited shutter speeds that required subjects to remain very still, often propped up against solid objects, such as walls or trees or park benches, to help ‘freeze’ movement. As emulsions and shutters improved to allow for the ‘freezing’ of faster moving objects, newspaper work slowly changed into the more familiar form we recognise today.

Most of the photographs that feature in this exhibition were taken with wooden cameras and exposed on glass-plate negatives. When you consider that Bell travelled the countryside on a horse, carrying his cumbersome camera, tripod and fragile glass-plate negatives, it becomes clear what a remarkable achievement these early assignments represented.

An immigrant originally from Hamilton, Scotland, Bell worked as a labourer before turning his hand to surveying in the Riverina region of New South Wales. It was a job that gave him a taste — and love — for life in the Australian bush. His connections to this landscape emerged clearly through the images he produced both for Kerry and Company and later for The Sydney Mail and The Sydney Morning Herald.

The arrival of aviation in Australia introduced a new platform for photography. In those early years the only aerial views most people would ever experience were the photographs produced by camera operators brave enough to climb aboard the flimsy early aircraft. On 8 May 1911 Bell rather heroically climbed into a Bristol biplane for a short hop with his camera. The flight took off from Ascot Racecourse (later swallowed up by Mascot Airport) and headed out over the ocean near Botany Bay, before doing a quick loop of the city and then coming back in to land via Marrickville and the Cooks River. Bell wrote in The Sydney Morning Herald about the difficulties of these early attempts at aerial photography: ‘There is not much to hang on to around the seat and although there are plenty of wires about, they must not be touched. Anyway, my hands were busy with the camera’. Just how did he manage to wrangle the fragile glass plates in an open cockpit? ‘We were simply flying through a gale, the wind roared in my ears the whole time andmy eyes began to water with the icy blast.’

Photograph of lower quality taken from a plane, with it's wing visible, flying over Sydney

'AEROPLANE AND CAMERA: ASCENT BY OUR PHOTOGRAPHER',  The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 10 May 1910, nla.gov.au/nla.news-page17341356

'AEROPLANE AND CAMERA: ASCENT BY OUR PHOTOGRAPHER',  The Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 10 May 1910, nla.gov.au/nla.news-page17341356

From this humble beginning aerial photography in Australia has evolved into an essential tool for telling a visual story: whether it is a question of covering floods, bushfires, droughts or dust storms, getting up in the air offers a unique new perspective that quite often represents the only way to give people the whole picture. Helicopters were used for their stability and versatility as a camera platform almost as soon as they were invented. They were, however, costly and hence only used when it was absolutely essential. Nowadays, most photographers carry a drone, which is like having an infinite tripod in your camera kit.

Big public events have always attracted photographic coverage and the technology associated with it. In the early twentieth century one huge public event prompted The Sydney Morning Herald to run its first news photograph. The arrival in Sydney of US President Teddy Roosevelt’s ‘Great White Fleet’ on 20 August 1908 drew what was estimated to be a crowd of half a million people to the foreshores of Sydney Harbour, at a time when the population of Sydney numbered 600,000. A lack in trust in the halftone reproduction process was perhaps demonstrated by the fact that a wood-block illustration was also commissioned and appeared on the page before the photograph in question.

Fast forward a decade and a half: the construction of that quintessential Sydney icon, the Sydney Harbour Bridge, was a project custom-made to be documented with photographs. Its every stage, from proposal, planning and build through to the opening ceremony, was covered by photojournalists from The Sydney Mail and The Sydney Morning Herald. Countless photographs have rendered it instantly recognisable, just like the Opera House.

The brilliance and commitment of individual photographers has always driven photographic coverage. In sports-mad Australia the appetite for cricket captivated one of Fairfax’s early photographers, Herbert Fishwick. Cricket is a sport where spectators are not able to get close to the action, and photographers are allowed only to line the boundary. This constraint prompted Fishwick to commission a specially made lens from English optical company Ross Ltd. When this custom lens was attached to his Graflex camera, Fishwick was able to capture pictures of previously unattainable quality and definition. He first used it during the 1920–21 Ashes tour, and when his photographs made their way back to England with the touring party, they caused a sensation. The whole set-up measured 1.2 metres in length, and Fishwick attached binoculars to his glasses, which allowed him to keep both hands free in order to manipulate the oversized equipment. Today long lenses are a familiar sight lining the boundary of a cricket ground. But it all started with Herbert Fishwick during that 1920–21 tour.

War, too, pushed the boundaries of photography. Roll film and the portable camera put the viewfinder close to everyone’s eyes. The outbreak of the First World War in August 1914 increased newspaper sales and popularised the personal camera. In the excitement of the war’s early days, Kodak advertisements breathlessly screamed, ‘Don’t let your soldier go away without a vest pocket Kodak’. As the death toll rose, and the wounded came limping home down the gangways, the company’s advertisements reverted to a simpler slogan: ‘Buy a vest pocket Kodak for Christmas’, with no mention of the war. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Sydney Mail both ran pictures of the Australian wounded, but actual death was not portrayed. Herald photographers took the now iconic images of the wounded being reunited with family members at the Anzac Buffets run by volunteers in Sydney’s Hyde Park.

In the years following George Bell’s short aerial hop around Sydney in 1911, aviation bounded ahead. Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s aviation firsts were chalked up, and records tumbled, as better and faster aeroplanes, capable of ever greater range, became available. In early June 1928 photographers covered the arrival of Australian pilots Charles Kingsford Smith and Charles Ulm, along with their two US crewmen, Harry Lyon and Jim Warner. They were the first people to complete a trans-Pacific flight from the mainland United States to Australia — a distance of 11,670 kilometres. They accomplished this feat in the Southern Cross, a Fokker tri-motor monoplane (VH-USU). As new records came and went, the great pioneering aviators’ arrivals and departures drew large crowds. Such events eased Australians’ sense of isolation and flagged the possibility of shrinking the ever-present ‘tyranny of distance’ that had been such an influence both within Australia and between it and other countries. 

Black and white photo of crowd surrounding a pair of pilots, one of whom has his arm raised in celebration

Fairfax Corporation, Reception for the crew of the Southern Cross at Mascot after flying across the Pacific, Sydney, 1929, 2, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-162556443

Fairfax Corporation, Reception for the crew of the Southern Cross at Mascot after flying across the Pacific, Sydney, 1929, 2, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-162556443

Less glamorous than covering aviation firsts, but arguably more important, was the task of recording the devastation of the Great Depression. Photographers captured heart-wrenching images of hundreds of unemployed people looking for work or taking to the rails in search of it, and of those who lined what became known as ‘the hungry mile’ along the waterfront at Darling Harbour. Shanty towns sprang up around the city as unemployment started to bite and ground on throughout the 1930s.

In 1929 the first airmail service began between Perth and Adelaide, shrinking the impossible distances of the Australian continent. Bigger news for photographers, however, was the appearance of the first ‘picturegrams‘. On 10 September pictures were transmitted by telegraph to The Sydney Morning Herald offices in Hunter Street, Sydney. Lodged at the sending office at 6:18 am in Melbourne, they arrived at 7:45 am. News photographs had suddenly become new, and as the sun was setting of the 1920s a new dawn was breaking for photojournalism: stories could be dictated and illustrated from distant places, with turnaround times once thought impossible. Today, with digital cameras, satellite phones and wi-fi technology, no corner of the globe — nor indeed regions beyond the earth – is out of reach.

The presence of cameras has not always been welcomed, however. On 12 December 1936 The Sydney Morning Herald carried a report from Frank Brennan, Labor member for Batman, criticising press photographers working in the House of Representatives: ‘The clicking of cameras had distracted members during speeches in the House this week,‘ he noted. The Speaker ruled that in future he would consult members on the matter and, if a certain number objected, he would ban the taking of photographs. Fast forward 88 years to early 2024 — just before I upgraded to mirrorless (silent) cameras — when Prime Minister Anthony Albanese interrupted a press conference to inquire, ‘Why are your cameras so noisy, Bowers?’ The more things change, the more they stay the same. Of course, if you happen to take something a politician likes, their staff will be straight on the line: ‘Can we use that photo?’

In the 1930s Australian motor sport was in its infancy. Seven Mile Beach at Gerringong, on the New South Wales south coast, was a regular venue for race meetings. A Sydney Morning Herald photographer attended one race meeting on 10 May 1930, a day when the track was ‘sodden and heavy’. One of my favourite images was taken during this meet. Jean Thompson, the wife of driver William Bethel Thompson, sits in their Type 37A Bugatti between races; her racing goggles around her neck — and a ladder running up her left stocking — point to her having accompanied her husband on at least one of his winning outings that day.

Black and white photo of a woman, Jean Thompson, sitting sideways in an old fashioned race car with a cap and goggles

Fairfax Corporation, Woman sitting in a race car at the Gerringong Motor Races, New South Wales, 10 May 1930, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-157983478

Fairfax Corporation, Woman sitting in a race car at the Gerringong Motor Races, New South Wales, 10 May 1930, nla.gov.au/nla.obj-157983478

A visit to Australia before plane travel became widely accessible usually involved a boat journey of many weeks. Famous passengers were a rich source of news photographs, and to get the jump on their competitors Sydney Morning Herald photographers would accompany the harbour pilots out to the Heads to meet up with the arrivals; scrambling up rickety boarding ladders with heavy gear would not have been a job for the faint-hearted. Once aboard, the photographer had an extended time with their famous subject while the ship proceeded to its berth. There are many examples of these ‘boat arrival’ photographs in the glass-plate collection. During those early years of the twentieth century Australia really did ride on the sheep’s back. This dependence is highlighted by the numerous images in the Fairfax Archive that cover every aspect of country life. In the late 1920s one accountant noted the expenses paid to one of the men employed to take photographs in country areas: his wage was £4 per week, but he was paid another £5 to cover the feeding of his horse and the upkeep of his buggy, both of which remained the property of ‘the firm’. It would take another year before the photographer’s wage caught up with match the money paid to his horse.

Newspapers were often slow to catch up with the giant leaps in photographic technology during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Beau Leonard, who took over from Arthur Martin in 1932 as The Sydney Morning Herald’s chief photographer, outlined problems not dissimilar to those encountered today. When photographers see a quantum improvement with a camera or a lens, they want to be able to use it immediately. After all, your name is printed underneath the photograph, and if another organisation is continually getting better results for the same assignment that becomes a great incentive to upgrade. A photographer will even buy their own gear, to simplify taking the shot by automating the process as much as possible. The job is difficult enough, and you need to secure every advantage you can. In a letter to the paper’s management in 1932, Leonard wrote: ‘I am very glad to inform you that four of our cameramen, Mr Fishwick, Mr Halmarick, Mr Harry Martin and myself, have all purchased our own standard 3 ½ inch X 4 ¼ inch press cameras two years ago. We began to use these cameras as soon as Arthur Martin left the office,’ meaning that Mr Martin had censored their use for two years.

Leonard went on to speak the universal language that always makes managers at news organisations pay attention: ‘cost savings’. He estimated ‘5 dozen plates per photographer per week’, which worked out at 12 a day, if the conservative figure of three jobs a day (with four frames per job) was applied. This is quite a frugal number when compared with today’s terabytes of digital storage, a development that has eliminated the need for such tight constraints. A direct line can be drawn between the photographers at today’s Sydney Morning Herald and these early practitioners. The people who mentored and taught me can still remember, and quote, the generation of photographers who were taught by Bell and Fishwick. 

This exhibition, while by no means exhaustive, does represent what caught my eye and those of the National Library’s curators. It covers the period from the first stilted and set-up pictures in the nineteenth century to a twentieth-century form of photojournalism that is recognisable today. We have looked at these images through modern eyes, and with the hindsight of history, but I hope what we have to say would meet with the approval of Bell and his pioneering colleagues. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as we have enjoyed putting it together. 

Page published: 28 Jan 2025

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