Elisa deCourcy

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.