Monthly Archive for October, 2009

On the 3rd October this year the Museum participated in the first global Flickr meetup Common Ground that was held by several of the institutions that participate in the Commons on Flickr. This global meetup happened on the weekend of the 2-3rd October across the world and included other institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, The New York Public Library, George Eastman House and the Swedish National Heritage Board.

Each institution showed a community curated slideshow featuring images from all of the collections in The Commons. This meetup was touted as a ‘thank you’ to the Flickr Community for making these collections richer through comments, tags and research and a chance to get to know the online audience face-to-face. So do these events work? We are keen to analyse why community would want to participate and meet the staff that work on these collections.

Associate-Professor Angelina Russo from Swinburne University of Technology is getting together some information on the Common Ground events for research purposes and would appreciate it if you could take some time to do a quick survey. If you attended our Common Ground event on the rather wet Saturday in October and could spare a minute to fill in a survey about this then it would be greatly appreciated. It is important to get your feedback.

Click Here to take survey

Photography by Paula Bray
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0

England-born, Sydney-based fashion photographer David Mist worked with Westfield in the 1980s and 1990s producing photographs for Westfield Shoppingtown catalogues. These shopping centres were established by Frank Lowy the well-known and successful Czechoslovakia-born migrant who arrived in Australia from Israel in 1952 and John Saunders, a Hungarian who migrated to Australia in 1950. On these assignments, David travelled across Australia and internationally to locations such as Bali, Thailand, Malaysia and Britain. The catalogues focus on shops in the Westfield centres, capturing characteristic fashion from these decades.

Some of these photographs will appear in the Powerhouse Museum’s forthcoming The 80s are Back! exhibition. The photograph with the camel was taken on a camel farm just outside Alice Springs in central Australia in1985. This shot reveals the extent of travel David enjoyed while working on the Westfield account. A shot from this series appears on the cover of the Westfield Shoppingtown’s Winter catalogues of 1989.

Photography by David Mist
© All rights reserved
Post by Clare Plascow, Curatorial intern

This photograph of Coogee Beach shows two bathing machines in the background. The bathing machine, a type of mobile change-room, was invented in England in the early 18th century and was still used in the late nineteenth century at seaside resorts. The bather would enter the back door of the cabin by a step ladder, change into their bathing clothes and then the machine would be wheeled or sometimes drawn by horses a short distance from the shore where the occupant could then exit into the sea from the front door. Bathing machines were mostly used by women as men were permitted to bathe publicly in their drawers.

Bathing machines appeared as early as 1827 in Australia, and by the 1860s they were installed, for the convenience of those who could afford to pay, at Manly, Clifton Gardens and Coogee. The machines were usually about six feet in length, eight feet high and windowless. The two bathing machines in this photograph have been adapted to the local environment with the addition of shark-proof cages at the front. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, the machines at Coogee were not generally used and the Ladies Own column of the Sydney Illustrated News on the 3rd of March, 1876 claimed: ‘Bathing machines, where they are used, generally stand in such shallow water that to dive from them, (let alone swim) is impossible, as the head would strike against the bottom.’

Photograph by Henry King, c. 1880s. Tyrrell collection
No known copyright restrictions
Post by Kathy Hackett, Photo Librarian

While millions of these ambrotype photographs were produced around the world and many thousands in Australia remarkably few have survived that can be linked to Australian society during the 1850s and 1860s. The accession register states that the sitter in the portrait is a young woman ‘Mrs. C. A. Ross’. Currently we have no more information relating to the sitter but would welcome comments from any one with more information.

No known copyright restrictions
Post by Geoff Barker, Assistant Curator

MLC Centre, Sydney (faux tilt-shift miniature), originally uploaded by vistic.

This really interesting image was taken by one of the members from our Modern Times group on Flickr. We started this group during the exhibition Modern Times: the untold story of Modernism in Australia and have kept the group going as there are some fantastic contributions being made to it. We have been asking for contemporary shots that represent Modernism either of architecture, city spaces, furniture, interiors, fashion and design but really want to see how photographers represent this era from a contemporary perspective such as the image above.

This image has been described by the photographer on Flickr as:

“My first attempt at faux tilt-shift miniaturization with a picture I took from the top of the Sydney Tower. The MLC Centre is where the US Consulate is located. Edited this in Raw Therapee to correct lens distortion, exposure, black level, colors, and contrast. Then edited in the GIMP with lots of selecting with quick mask, gaussian blur, and layers (the top part, bottom part, MLC Centre, and the blue building are separate layers with different blurs applied to each of them).”

Photography by vistic
License: Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic