Portrait of a group of Menang Noongar men and women. Albany area, Western Australia, late 1880s.

Albumen print photograph, carte de visite format, 104 x 63 mm (mount), verso with wet stamp of ‘J. H. Otto, Portrait and Landscape Photographer, Albany, W.A.’; the print has mottling in the negative and has lost some contrast; the mount has old residual glue marks verso (the carte was once mounted in an album).

A rare nineteenth-century image of Menang Noongar people, of which we have not been able to trace another example in institutional collections.

The Vancouver Street photographic partnership of Dutch-born Johann Henri Otto, who had arrived in Albany from Mauritius via Adelaide toward the end of 1884, and J. Bloome, was dissolved in sudden and acrimonious circumstances in August 1888, when Bloome, who had allegedly embezzled the firm, absconded overnight. Otto took over the business and started to advertise it under his own name. He placed the following notice in the Albany Mail and King George’s Sound Advertiser, 8 August 1888:

‘Though Mr. Bloome has thought fit to disappear by the last P. & O. steamer without accounting for monies received, and orders taken during his trip to Kojonup, I beg to inform the inhabitants of Albany and Kojonup that all orders to hand, given either to MR. BLOOME or to myself personally, will be executed by me promptly. All persons indebted to OTTO & BLOOME, or myself, are requested to settle forthwith. The photographic business will in future be carried on in my own name. Hoping to receive the same support as hitherto, I beg to assure the public at. arge that I shall spare no pains with constant study and hard work, improvements and novelties in the photographic line to give every satisfaction. J. H OTTO, Photographer. Albany, August 7, I888.’

In January 1891, Otto closed his studio (which by that time had moved to Lower Sterling Terrace) and departed Albany.