How the discovery of old photos exposed an ancestor’s hidden talent
A young woman’s record of rural life in Australia in the late 1800s is finally getting its day in the sun after her great-granddaughter found her work in a Sydney attic.
Photographer Blanche Violet Maher died almost a century ago, leaving behind a trove of sepia pictures depicting scenes from her privileged life in rural NSW.
After languishing in an attic for decades, these will go on exhibition for the first time today, thanks to the passion of her Sydney-based great-granddaughter.
In the photographs, languid young women disport themselves in long Edwardian dresses. Men in suits play cards on a wicker garden table. Teams of sturdy horses cart wool bales to market.
They were just normal days for the Maher family, who lived on the well-known sheep run Collaroy Station, managed by Maher’s father, Matthew Maher, in the Upper Hunter region of NSW.
Born in 1872, Maher began taking pictures after convincing her father to buy her a camera when she was 21.
Daily life on Collaroy Station provided many inspiring subjects, and Maher’s images did them lyrical justice.
She was clearly influenced by photographic Pictorialism, an aesthetic movement that held sway from about 1860 into the early 20th century.
Despite her obvious talent, Maher and her photographs were never publicly known, although she did win three pounds in a photographic prize in 1900. After her death in 1930 she was duly forgotten by all but her descendants.
Until COVID-19.
For Sydney University communications lecturer Julia Booth, the presence of a talented woman photographer in the family tree had always been a source of pride.
Unable to travel because of the pandemic, Booth decided to devote time to unearthing the story of her ancestor. She rummaged through her parents’ Double Bay attic, but found none of the glass plates or negatives that Maher would have used to make her pictures.
What she did find, however, was about 50 of Maher’s photographs, some in their own album and others stuck to loose bits of cardboard.
There was also a notebook, in Maher’s elegant handwriting, recording recipes and knitting patterns at one end and photographic chemical formulas at the other. As a member of the Gulgong Amateur Photographic Association, she might have learnt the formula there.
“It was from that notebook that I thought, this is really powerful,” Booth says.
Rephotographed and printed in large format by Sydney master printer Warren Macris, the images will finally receive due credit in the exhibition Blanche Violet Maher: Landscapes and Portraits 1894-1920, which opens today, March 6, at Sydney’s Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf.
The exhibition is co-curated by Booth and the San Francisco-born, Sydney-based photographic editor Rachel Knepfer.
While the facts of Maher’s life are few, Booth treasures anecdotes passed down to her. They came from one of Maher’s daughters, the late Joy Jennings, whose sister Winsome was Booth’s grandmother.
“Joy told me some really fabulous stories about having a pet kookaburra called Christopher Columbus and just growing up on the farm,” Booth says.
“She told me the shearers called Blanche the Southerly Buster, which gives you an idea what she was like.”
In 1900, Blanche Violet Maher married Alfred Jennings, a station manager like her father. Jennings’ father was Sir Patrick Jennings, NSW premier from 1886-1887.
Booth decided to use Maher’s maiden name in the exhibition because many of her photographs predated her marriage.
Maher continued to take photographs after 1900, although she was busy with a growing family. As far as Booth can piece it together, she was an active photographer between 1894 and 1920.
While Maher’s parents Matthew and Sarah and her sisters Eve and Nellie appear in some of the photographs, mystery surrounds many of the people and places in the images Booth found in her parents’ attic.
For Booth, who hopes to position Maher as more than just a talented photography enthusiast, the loss of such details don’t really matter.
“I feel very strongly about Blanche as an artist,” she says.
“I really liked the fact there was this young woman with an idea who was a photographer. It’s lovely to have the way she viewed the world shared with us in the 21st century.”
Need to know
- Blanche Violet Maher: Landscapes and Portraits 1894-1920, Woollahra Gallery at Redleaf, March 6 to 17.
- Julia Booth and Warren Macris will take part in a panel discussion about experimental photography on Saturday March 9 at the gallery from 3pm to 4pm. Afternoon tea will be served, including biscuits made from Maher’s original recipes.
- The photographs and notes are also collected in a book, Blanche Violet Maher, Landscapes & Portraits 1894 to 1920. Available at the gallery throughout the exhibition, $225.
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