Photography

The Business of Photography

Sydney University’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum

Chau Chak Wing Museum

by Elisa deCourcy •

ABR Arts • 11 March 2021

Photography

The Business of Photography

Sydney University’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum

Chau Chak Wing Museum

by Elisa deCourcy •

ABR Arts • 11 March 2021

Few exhibitions about photography are premised on something other than the resulting image. The Business of Photography: The 19th century studio in NSW at Sydney University’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum makes an intriguing step back from the cased daguerreotypes, carte de visite, and collectable stereo cards of the nineteenth century. It invites visitors into the places of these images’ latency and the jostling personalities that brought them into being. Curator Jan Brazier has put together a playful show that tracks the photography studio from mid-nineteenth-century itinerant operations to early twentieth-century industrial powerhouses. It highlights the tension between the boosterish egos and financial precarity that shrouded these businesses in colonial New South Wales.

Elisa deCourcy

Elisa deCourcy is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow based at the Australian National University. She is a specialist in early photography and is currently completing a substantial project on the first fifteen years of photographic practice in the Australian colonies. Her scholarship is informed by deep archival research, practice-led investigation, and rethinking digital design for photographically centred heritage collections. Her work has been covered by The Guardian, The Smithsonian Magazine, and The Conversation. Her latest book, Empire, Early Photography and Spectacle: The global career of showman daguerreotypist J.W. Newland, co-authored with Martyn Jolly, was published with Routledge in February 2021. She has been the recipient of several grants and prizes both from within Australia and abroad.