“The public may not be aware that there is a photographic album at Scotland Yard, in which may be seen the carte of every ticket-of-leave man in the country … One carte de visite is kept in the police album at Scotland Yard, another at the station-house of the division of the metropolis in which he may select to reside, and a third is forwarded to any country district he may wish to remove to …” … More The first Rogues’ Galleries
Photo historians in recent years have judged these 1870s Tasmanian prisoner cdv’s in terms that either attempt to aesthetise the photograph as an art history artefact (Chris Long, 1995), and therefore expect all the versos to display a studio stamp, for example, or situate them within a discourse of eugenics in similar manner to the appraisal of collections of Aboriginal portraits. In the 1990s some have attempted to impose a postmodern Marxist interpretation to underscore differentials of power and class, notably Isobel Crombie (2004) after Helen Ennis, (2000). … More Laterality: the poses in Nevin’s portraits
Tourists to Tasmania in the early 1900s were encouraged to disagree with this sort of thinking put forward in newspapers by Dr Goring. With the intense promotion of Tasmania’s penal heritage in the early 1900s, due largely to the release of the first of the two films based on Marcus Clarke’s 1874 novel, For The Term of His Natural Life (1908, 22 minutes), many Tasmanian prisoner identification photographs taken by Thomas J. Nevin on government contract to police and prison authorities in the 1870s were reprised by John Watt Beattie and Edward Searle for sale as tourist tokens in Beattie’s convictaria museum in the 1900s, called The Port Arthur Museum, although it was located in Hobart and not at Port Arthur. … More The PARKHURST prisoners & anthropometry
Tasmanian photographer | Thomas J. Nevin (1842-1923) 
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