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George
Baron Goodman (d.1851)
Portrait of Dr William Bland
c.1845
Courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State
Library of New South Wales
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Daguerreotype
Portrait of Dr William Bland
c.1845
The
world's first permanent photograph was taken by
Nicéphore Niepce (17651833) in 1826,
and had an exposure time of eight hours. Louis
Daguerre (17871851) spent over a decade
trying to turn Niepce's invention into a reliable,
accessible photographic process. In 1839, with
the exposure time down to 30 seconds, it became
possible to use the 'daguerreotype' for portrait
photography.
George
Baron Goodman introduced Daguerre's process to
Australia in 1842, and set up a permanent studio
in Sydney in 1844, where he made this image of
Dr William Bland (17891861), the first documented
photograph in Australia. Goodman kept the portrait
for display purposes, to convince others to be
immortalised in a daguerreotype. At the time,
Bland was a well-known naval surgeon, who had
been stripped of his rank and transported to New
South Wales after killing a man in a duel in 1813.
He stayed in Australia at the end of his seven-year
sentence, and after making his fortune began agitating
for an independent government. His (and others')
efforts were rewarded when the British Parliament
granted New South Wales its own Parliament in
1842. The next year Bland was voted representative
of Sydney in Australia's first democratic election.
Daguerreotype
production did not have a long life. The process
produced no negative, only a single, sticky, fragile
layer of emulsion on a heavy copper plate, which
needed to be immediately protected with a layer
of glass. The future of photography lay in the
negative process, which was developed by William
Henry Fox Talbot in 1835.
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