Tag: Helen Ennis

Prisoner Henry CLABBY and the TMAG frame-up

November 29, 2015

The Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery constructed four wooden-framed collages under glass from their collection of Thomas Nevin’s prisoner mugshots for an exhibition titled Mirror with a Memory at the National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, in 2000. Henry Clabby’s image was placed top row, centre in this frame. However, for reasons best described as blind-sided, the TMAG staff who chose these mugshots sent three of the four frames to Canberra, six per frame, with labels on the back of each wooden frame stating quite clearly that the photographs were attributed to A. H. Boyd, the much despised Commandant of the Port Arthur prison who was not a photographer by any definition of the term, nor an engineer despite any pretension on his part and especially despite the social pretensions of his descendants who began circulating the photographer attribution as a rumour in the 1980s to compensate no doubt for Boyd’s vile reputation.
… More Prisoner Henry CLABBY and the TMAG frame-up

“In a New Light”: NLA Exhibition with Boyd misattribution

April 1, 2009

The National Library of Australia had acquired 68 (84 total in May 2010) of these Tasmanian prisoner mugshots (catalogued as Port Arthur convicts) by 1982, some from Dr Neil Gunson as archival estrays deposited in the 1960s, many from the QVMAG as T. J. Nevin’s duplicates, and some as John Watt Beattie’s copies made ca. 1916, also from the QVMAG. Some of the NLA’s copies were also held as copies at the Archives Office of Tasmania, as the letters and other documents at the NLA in Thomas Nevin’s Australian Photographers Ephemera File clearly indicate in 1982, yet they were not accessioned, exhibited or catalogued until May 1995, and when they were catalogued, they were attributed correctly to Thomas J. Nevin as photographer. A. H. Boyd’s name was never mentioned in Chris Long’s letters sent to the NLA in 1982 (Sprod MS), which included a general statement about the prisoner cartes-de-visite collection and a brief summary about Nevin’s work. But Chris Long is now regarded as the eventual perpetrator of the Boyd misattribution. … More “In a New Light”: NLA Exhibition with Boyd misattribution

Laterality: the poses in Nevin’s portraits

July 22, 2008

The National Library of Australia holds a collection of carte-de-visite photographs of Tasmanian convicts, taken originally by professional photographer Thomas J. Nevin in the 1870s-1880s of men at trial in  the Supreme Court and adjoining Hobart Gaol, and of men released with conditions at the Town Hall Municipal Police Office. Of the eighty-two (82) images … More Laterality: the poses in Nevin’s portraits

NLA’s ‘Intersections’ with convict carte by Nevin

August 23, 2007

There is no doubt that the early years of transportation to Tasmania’s Port Arthur prison have been the primary focus and fascination for historians. It feeds and feeds off the aggressive promotion of the prison site as the State’s key historic attraction. And it has become the convention and norm of writers to corral one or more of these prisoner ID photographs within their new texts that deal with those early years. Michael Bogle’s recent publication on convicts (2008), as an example, has Nevin’s negative (1875) of convict Charles Rosetta on the front cover, unattributed to Nevin, and wrongly dated to 1917 with attribution to the copyists Beattie & Searle, from the NLA. … More NLA’s ‘Intersections’ with convict carte by Nevin

Isobel Crombie (2004) 29

How misattribution can persist

July 30, 2007

Isobel Crombie’s book, Body Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture, 1919-1939, published by the National Gallery of Victoria (2004) includes this original photograph of a Tasmanian prisoner taken by government contractor and professional photographer Thomas J. Nevin, dated 1874, with misattribution to the Port Arthur Commandant A. H .Boyd on page 39. In a discussion which lies outside the dates of the book’s title, Isobel Crombie attributes this carte-de-visite of convict Henry Smith per Rodney 2 to A. H. Boyd, an accountant promoted through nepotism to the position of Commandant of the Port Arthur prison site, a position he held until forced to resign in December 1873. A. H. Boyd had no reputation in his lifetime as a photographer, and no works in any genre by him are extant. … More How misattribution can persist