For almost a century, thousands of Fairfax employees filed daily past the grainy photograph of a stern looking gentleman astride a horse, a quaint looking box strapped to his chest. The 1910 image of George Bell – widely believed to be Australia’s first press photographer – oversaw the daily bustle of one of the country’s largest media empires, publisher of the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Australian Financial Review, the Canberra Times, the Sun-Herald, and a host of rural and regional publications.
When Fairfax left its Jones Street premises in Sydney in the 1990s, George went too, rehung in the corridors of the slick new building in Sussex Street, and again when the company moved to Pyrmont in 2007.
Sadly, when the Guardian contacted Nine earlier this week, no one was able to say what has happened to George since the network acquired Fairfax six years ago. But for veteran photographer Mike Bowers, who spent more than quarter of a century working at Fairfax, and a further 12 years at this publication, the photograph of George Bell has remained an enduring image throughout his career – capturing as it does the challenges of his profession’s forbears.
When Bowers embarked on a curatorial role last year, putting together the National Library of Australia’s Fit to Print: Defining Moments in the Fairfax Photo Archive exhibition that opened in Canberra this week, George Bell was his starting point.
“I always wondered how he did it, getting around town on horseback, and I mean, look at the size of that camera.”
And then there were the glass plates that were required for every image. Although Kodak had introduced its first Brownie with 117 roll film in 1900, professional photography would continue to use glass plates for several more decades. Fragile weighty objects, the sheets of glass coated in an emulsion of gelatin, potassium bromide and silver nitrate measured 8cm x 11cm minimum and as many as six had to be carried on any given job.
How did he do it?
In 2012 Fairfax donated 18,000 glass-plate negatives, covering the period from 1890 to 1948, to the National Library archives. As Bowers trawled through the collection he landed on the negative of the George Bell image. The photograph Bowers had given a daily nod to for more than two decades had been cropped. In the negative, two horses attached to a cart 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 images in the Fit to Print exhibition have been locked away for more than a century. And most have never been displayed in their full format. Photography as a medium was not tailored for newspaper publication. With most original prints either 16×20 or 16×24 inches, they were made to be admired on walls, not in newsprint.
The exhibition captures the earliest forms of paparazzi, invariably achieved through the cooperation of the celebrities targeted. Prior to commercial aviation, sea was the only way into Australia, and the gateway to Sydney was North Head. Newspapers of the day commandeered boats to travel out to meet incoming ships, capturing the first images of royals, notable overseas visitors in the arts, sciences, sport and politics, and international sensations such as Anna Pavlova and Harry Houdini.
Posing on deck, the subjects would be dressed in their best, ready for the cameras. Which was just as well, because the photojournalists of the day had in most part trained in the big photographic portrait studios, and that was the style they brought to the media. Subjects were ordered into position and obliged to hold the pose at the photographer’s pleasure.
With cameras capable of holding only one negative in at a time and the photographer limited to the number of glass plates they could carry, every shot mattered and it had to be carefully staged to convey the message of the story.
“It was a pretty stilted approach to photography,” says Bowers. “It had to be completely set up, so a lot of these pictures look almost mannequin-like.”
He turns to an image of a railway platform scene, a wounded soldier farewelling a recruit.
While the modern eye might assume the photographer captured a fleeting patriotic image in a snatched second, the scene is highly staged, for pure propaganda reasons.
Another shows Australian first world war soldiers creeping through a jungle, weapons at the ready, the enemy possibly immediately ahead. The image was taken during training and the subjects would have been told to freeze, mid-manoeuvre, for the half-second exposure.
While covering Australia’s national passion in the early 1900s, one of Fairfax’s most prolific photographers of the time, Herbert Henry Fishwick, grew disillusioned with photography’s inability to capture the emotion on the cricket pitch from the media pit far off-field. He wrote to an optical lens company in England that manufactured telescopes, and commissioned a particularly long lens – about 1.2 metres in length. Fishwick used the lens for the first time during the 1920-1921 Ashes tour, and Bowers believes this marked the first time a telephoto lens was used anywhere in the world.
“He needed both hands to wrangle it, but the pictures were of such quality that all the English touring team ordered pictures of themselves, they’d never seen anything like it. And when these photos reached England, newspapers sent people out to see how it was done.
“I believe the birth of long-lens photography can be traced to the Sydney Morning Herald.”
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In 1923 construction began on the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Bowers believes the photographers who documented its almost decade-long construction also provided a visual timeline for the significant leaps in technology photography made during that decade.
“At the beginning of construction, you’ve got the old technology, by the time the arches meet you’ve got really good shutters that are starting to get freeze action. And you’ve got emulsions that are starting to get much faster.
You can see images aren’t set up any more, they’ve just come along and photographed workers in action.
“In many ways, the bridge and other projects like that helped to develop the recognisable sort of photojournalistic style that we use today.”
The image of gatecrashing fascist Francis de Groot wielding his sword high seconds before cutting the ribbon at the bridge’s opening ceremony in 1932 is one of Australia’s iconic 20th century images.
Neither this image – nor any of the others capturing De Groot being toppled from his horse and arrested – would have been possible, Bowers says, a decade earlier, given what was considered cutting edge photographic technology back in 1923.
In the age of the smartphone, everyone today it seems is a photographer. No longer are newspapers reliant on rushing photographers to the scene of a sudden major event, crime or catastrophe, to capture in pictures what has taken place before it is over. Members of the public caught in the midst of it all will do that for them.
“But good photography is still good photography, and it will always bubble to the surface,” Bowers says.
Judging recent photographic awards in New Zealand, he believes he has noticed a deterioration in skills such as editing, the ability to recognise a shot within a shot, and cropping.
‘There’s a deterioration in the nuts and bolts of it all … and I think that comes from the fact that we now have a generation of photographers who have never been in a darkroom.
When you’re in a darkroom, you move the easel around, you change the height of it, you see where the actual picture is.
“And now that’s all gone.”