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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

 

Daguerreotype Portrait of Dr William Bland
c.1845

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Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales
Sydney
Australia

The world's first permanent photograph was taken by Nicéphore Niepce (1765–1833) in 1826, and had an exposure time of eight hours. Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) 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 (1789–1861), 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.