In Port Esperance, Tasmania

[Title from caption on mount]. Between 1862 and 1866. Albumen print photograph, 190 x 240 mm, laid down on original album leaf, 270 x 370 mm, contemporary manuscript title in ink beneath the image In Port Esperance, Tasmania; the print is in fine condition with excellent tonal range; the album sheet is entirely frre from foxing.

A rare example of the photography of Morton Allport, the Tasmanian naturalist who, from around 1855, was active as one of the colony’s pioneer photographers. Allport was a member of the Amateur Photographic Association of Great Britain and his landscape photographs were awarded several of the Association’s prizes.

The Allport Library (State Library of Tasmania) holds the only other copy of this image in identical large format, dated to between 1862 and 1866; it also holds a small, cropped version, 80 x 76 mm, being one half of a stereoview.