The short corridor into the exhibition features wonderfully grainy reproductions from The Australasian Photographic Review and the Australian Photographic Journal. Before even peering at a cabinet card, we see into the cluttered Falk Studios, Sydney and the Charleston Studio, Newcastle crowded with variously sized large-format, glass-plate cameras and ornate turned-wood chairs. Different screens and backdrops are supported on adjacent walls. A screen of atmospheric clouds hangs on one side of a studio room, latticed vines on another, all nailed taut to the architraves. Plants are bathed in light from the studio’s glass roof, but sit behind the cameras while plump feathered cushions wait expectantly next to empty chairs, concessions to the draconian-looking head braces.

Interior of a photographic studio, late nineteenth century, possibly England (Chau Chak Wing Museum: HP83.30.93)

Originally published in photography periodicals, these are images not of the experience of portraiture but its essential artifice. They take us to spaces we have only otherwise encountered cropped down in gilt frames and with sepia hues. On the opposite wall, Brazier and the design team have reproduced a selection of the commissioned outputs of businesses such as these ones, but not the portraits of clients you would expect. We see photographs shot around urban geographies in which ‘studios’ also operated. There is a particularly memorable image taken of the scaffolded sandstone façade of the Colonial Secretary’s Building. Workers lean unharnessed against turrets three storeys high or precariously balance on weighted pulley systems, all turned towards and posing for the photographer. Brazier reminds us that the ‘studio’ was a commercial enterprise, not a contained space – the camera and photographer negotiating, with increasing agility, shots both within and beyond its advertised address.

The theme of enterprise continues through the vitrines and cabinets. The cased daguerreotypes and ambrotypes are placed next to reproductions of press advertisements, heavy in superlatives, punctuation, and ornate typography. You can almost hear the photographers spruiking from the page. As many of the carte de visite and cabinet cards are turned over as those with subjects staring back at us. Here again we see excessive attention to typography and branding with fleur-de-lis, manufactured coats of arms, and claims to élite attachment – ‘Photographers to the Governor’ printed on their backs. Turning from the newspaper advertisement, to the cabinet card verso, to the letterhead, to the pamphlet, Brazier captures the incessant branding of these businesses, all clawing for notoriety and custom. Yet in the centre of the room, among the spruiking, is a revealing document: two pages reproduced from William Augustus Nicholas’ Insolvency Schedule, dated 21 June 1867. As Brazier remarks in the label, this document from the New South Wales State Archives gets to the heart of the studio enterprise, showing pared back for the debt collectors exactly what was needed to run a photography business in the 1860s: ‘seals and weights’, ‘box[es] of colours’, ‘vinaigrette funnels’, a ‘carpet’, ‘1 head rest’.

The exhibition gives spaces to the household names and studios of nineteenth-century New South Wales photography: Glaister; Hetzer; Kerry & Co; and Freeman & Co. But Brazier has worked hard to extract some of the less vociferous voices from this scene too. One vitrine holds no photographs at all only the notebook of German itinerant (Johann Heinrich) Christian Jorss, who travelled through regional New South Wales in the 1860s. Inside it are recipes for collodion emulsion: gelatin silver, colour, and fixer solutions. This modest notebook is a rare gem for those among us keen to understand how photographic methods were actually learnt and executed on the colonial frontier. Presented in translation from the original German on the Chau Chak Wing Museum website, it is inscribed with annotations like ‘light but not direct sun’, giving a sense that the composition of the notebook is undertaken adjacent to Jorss trying and testing his methods.

Circular Quay, 1880–1900, (J. Paine, Sydney Chau Chak Wing Museum: HP82.39.169)

Brazier is particularly attuned to the women who worked in these studios. Many panels include mention of wives-cum-assistants. Discussion of early twentieth-century large stock and trade studios like Freeman’s includes a reproduction of a photograph of four women sourced from the National Library of Australia. Madeline Denshire, Miss Hall, an unidentified woman, and Clara Halls – receptionists and assistants of Freeman’s – pose dramatically in elaborate hats and feather boas flung over their more conservative workwear for a playful portrait; faces accustomed to the process of photography but rarely seen in front of the lens.

Brazier’s exhibition invites us into the studio, a fluid space, though it also leaves us wanting more. As we trundle along the vitrines examining the delicate embossing, stencilling, and colour tinting of surviving photographs – and stand in front of cameras and loaded stereoscopes from the original Macleay collection – we cannot help but think of those faces in the frame before us. After seeing a detailed ‘portrait’ of the personalities behind the camera, we are left wondering about those who took up the invitation in photographers’ advertisements or the First Nations people forced in front of the lens. What was their experience of the studio enterprise? In these spaces of diffuse light and beyond, what where the negotiations that happened across the boundary of the camera? More work needs to be done on what colonial clients demanded of the art of photography, and how their appetites shaped the business of the studio.

The Business of Photography: The 19th century studio in NSW is at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney, until 22 August 2021.

This project is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.