Portrait of small barefoot boy on a wooden ladder

Published by Paula Bray on March 29, 2009 1 Comment

This gorgeous image of a small boy on a ladder was added to the Commons on Flickr this week. This image comes from our Phillips photographic collection. We still have a few more loads to go before the whole collection is all loaded to the Commons.

There have been suggestions that the Phillips collection of photographs was created by Harry Phillips, (1873-1944), an early twentieth century photographer born in Ballarat and best known for his photographs of the Blue Mountains. Recent museum research has shown that the photographer Harry J. Phillips, the uncle of Raymond W. Phillips, was born in Sydney in 1872. There does not appear to be any connection between the families of the Ballarat-born Harry Phillips and Harry J. Phillips.

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  • http://lifeasdaddy.typepad.com/ Bob Meade

    Gorgeous is right. Such a wonderful portrait, and I think a very unusual portrait of a child for the time. I can’t think of any other I’ve seen with the subject on a ladder.

    I was one of the proponents of the idea that Raymond Philips’ uncle Harry was the Harry Phillips from the far famed Blue Mountains.

    It is a shame that the facts got in the way of my theory (http://www.powerhousemuseum.com/imageservices/?p=888 ) but the truth will out.

    I’ve checked quite a few of Harry “Blue Mountains” Phillips published view books, of which there are at least 83, and have not yet found any published photographs the same as the glass plate negatives in the Raymond W. D. Phillips collection of the PHM – thus lending further weight to the liklihood that Harry “Blue Mountains” Phillips has nothing to do with the PHM images.

    It is believed that the glass plate negatives of Harry “Blue Mountains” Phillips were sold to a Toowoomba photography house along with his equipment and that the plates were destroyed in the 1970′s because they were taking up too much space. (source: Phillip Kay’s book on Harry Phillips.)

    Just about the only thing that remains to check now is to compare the “rare images of Peace Day celebrations 1918″ which are part of the Raymond W. D. Phillips collection with those published by Harry “Blue Mountains” Phillips in his 1919 book “Peace souvenir of the Blue Mountains N.S.W.”
    ( http://nla.gov.au/anbd.bib-an5392596 )