Two studio photographs of Aborigines, Brisbane, late 1860s

Albumen print photographs, carte de visite format, each 101 x 64 mm, versos with imprint of D. Marquis, Photographer, George Street, Brisbane, one of the prints slightly pale otherwise both in very good condition, the mounts with some mild toning to the edges and lightly marked verso (one with contemporary pencil annotations).

Marquis opened his studio at 82 George Street in 1866, and these elaborately composed tableaux of Aboriginal groups date to between 1866 and around 1870. They are highly significant images in that they pre-date the well known series of larger format tableaux taken by J.W. Lindt in his Grafton studio around 1873. A copy of one of these images and a very close variant of the other are held in the collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum. An article titled Ten Queensland Photographs in the Founding Collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum by Christopher Morton, the Museum’s Curator of Photographs and Manuscripts, is published online and provides valuable collection information about both of the images ( http://web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/index.php/objectbiographies/72-10-queensland-photographs ). In one of the tableaux we see a group of young women seated at lower left, and one of the four standing men is holding a European axe over his shoulder. Christopher Morton comments as follows:

‘[1998.249.7.14] This print was … purchased from the Estate of Friedrich Dammann in 1901. It is closely related to Godeffroy no. 55 which includes a European man to the right of the group (published in Sumner 1986: 165), copies of which appear in a number of European museums (Theye 2004: 260). This Dammann print is labelled “Bride Capture” on the PRM mount. The original which Dammann copied does not seem to be part of the Dietrich set, but is also possibly the work of the Daniel Marquis studio in Brisbane, and was possibly a print acquired by the Berliner Gesellschaft in the same period. This image was published by Dammann in his Anthropologisches-Ethnologisches Album in Photographien (1872-4) in Table 3 (Australia), with the caption “Australier Brautbewerbung”, i.e. “Australian courtship”.

Of the second image, in which we see a sick man being tended to on the left and a camp fire on the right, Morton notes:

‘[1998.249.7.15] This print was also purchased from the Estate of Friedrich Dammann in 1901. It is almost identical to one in the John Oxley Library, Brisbane (published in Sumner 1986: 163), but with the standing men keeping their heads down instead of facing the camera. It is also thereby probably the work of the Daniel Marquis studio in Brisbane. Sumner proposes that the John Oxley Library print may be the same image as Godeffroy no. 54. In fact there seem to be several slight variations of this scene, including the version in the Archer album in the John Oxley Library, the version in Leiden, and this Dammann copy of an unknown original, possibly collected by the Berliner Gesellschaft. These variations show that several versions of this grouping were produced by the Daniel Marquis studio and disseminated widely. Dammann did not however use this image in his Anthropologisches-Ethnologisches Album in Photographien (1872-4).’

The pair of cartes de visite we offer here, with the crucial studio imprints verso, confirm the identity of the photographer of the Pitt Rivers and John Oxley images as Daniel Marquis.

Source: Rethinking Pitt-Rivers | Ten Queensland Photographs in the Founding Collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum. Christopher Morton, 2010-2011.