Australia’s earliest scientific photographs are revealed in a new exhibition

Orange Regional Museum has reopened this month with new photography exhibition, Capturing Nature: early photography at the Australian Museum 1857-1893.

Capturing Nature is a touring exhibition created by the Australian Museum in Sydney. It was set to open at the Orange Regional Museum in March, but of course the museum was shut due to COVID-19 restrictions on public gatherings.

The exhibition features 65 large-format photographic prints showcasing the scientific discoveries of Australian Museum scientists between the 1850s and 1890s, while also telling the story of the advent of photography in the young colony, less than 20 years after the birth of photography in Europe.

The images range from the initial tentative experiments in the 1850s to the time when photography was becoming an indispensable part of museum practice in the early 1890s.

The subjects vary from a large sunfish and the flipper of a sperm whale to a gorilla and the fragile bones of a flamingo. Most of the specimens photographed at the museum are by taxidermist, Henry Barnes and his son, Henry Barnes Jnr with the help of the Australian Museum’s pioneering Curator Gerard Krefft.

Photography at the time was expensive and complicated, so every photograph was carefully planned. The animals were first prepared and posed and then positioned for best natural light and least shadow.

The photos were taken in and around the museum, mostly in the courtyards and gardens to best exploit the precious light required by the photographers’ rudimentary cameras. Alongside the specimens, the figures of scientists can often be seen as a gauge of scale.

Exhibition curator Vanessa Finney explained that through their photography, Krefft and Barnes were spreading the knowledge of Australian science.

“In these days of instant digital images, it’s hard to imagine the effort that went into creating photos during photography’s first century and a half. Each single image was precious — and painstaking to create,” Ms Finney said.

“Their photographs disseminated to the world the image of Australia and its fauna at a time of great international enthusiasm for the fledgling colony’s unusual plants and animals.”

Beautiful, haunting and sometimes strange, Capturing Nature is not only a unique record of early Australian science, but also brings to life the story of one of humankind’s greatest inventions.

Capturing Nature is showing at Orange Regional Museum until Sunday 2 August 2020. The Museum is open 9am-4pm daily and entry is free.