Guy Hansen: Hello. My name is Guy Hansen. I'm Director of Exhibitions. When we do exhibitions at the National Library of Australia, we'd like to showcase the strength and and variety of the collections we hold here so people can get an idea of how valuable an institution this is for Australians. The Fairfax collection, which is something like 18,000 glass plate negatives, from the 1890s through to the 1940s.

It's an amazing, picture book of Australian history. And it's so important that people can see this material and then can go and explore it themselves using Trove or the catalogue of the National Library.

Allister Mills: Welcome to Learn with the Curators Fit to Print edition.

Karlee Baker: We're very proud here at the National Library of Australia to acknowledge the First Australians as the traditional owners and custodians of the land that we're on today, and to pay respects to their elders, past and present, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.

This program today is made possible through the generous contribution of the Opalgate Foundation to the Library's Lifelong Learning Initiative.

Now, the way it's going to work today, you can see that Allister and I are already in the gallery. We'll pop in and out but we would love you to go ahead and open up the Q&A, that's how you make sure that Allister gets to see your questions today, but also a way for you to contribute to the conversation.

You've heard a little bit from Guy Hansen. We'll bring up some interviews from Mike Bowers as well. So lots of opportunity for you to pop your ideas through. So we really hope that you'll be learning from Allister, Guy and Mike around not only the archive, but the exhibition and how to investigate some of those pieces. And we're also keen to hear your thoughts.

Guy Hansen: So, Fairfax had this large holding of glass plate negatives, and they negotiated with the National Library, that the library would take possession of them and digitize them. And make them available. So Fairfax were able to see an important part of the archive preserved in the National Library of Australia was able to get access to this wonderful cache.

Of photographs which are now available, through our catalogue, or through Trove online. Well, the exhibition does cover off a very important period in Australian history and that period where Australia is really forming its national identity. I think you see some wonderful images relating to to the First World War, both the beginning of the war and the end of the war.

There's some images which I think talk to the struggles in the Great Depression as well. And there's some beautiful images of, the countryside and regional New South Wales as well. So, you can sort of see that development of a visual vocabulary of how Australians saw themselves in the pictures.

It's very difficult to, select, what images to actually put in the exhibition. And we all have our favourites. But the great thing is, working with someone like Mike. Mike Bowers, he's a, he's an expert in the history of Australian photography and in photojournalism. So he used his very specialized professional eye to look for the images, which he was able to do online and through other formats as well, and make a selection.

And of course, it was a winnowing process. We got down to maybe 500, and then we had to go down again and again. And of course, to get down to the final 150 was very hard work. But it's a beautiful selection.

Mike Bowers: I'm Mike Bowers. And I'm a photographer who's been working in the newspaper magazine industry for 37 years. Curating this exhibition for the National Library gave me an opportunity to look at the entire collection of glass. And the entire collection spans, basically the history of photojournalism and the birth of it from its very stilted start, where they borrowed photographers from and they borrowed and employed photographers from the big studios of the day.

So these photographers were sort of ripe for the picking when they started to, recruit them for newspapers. And, the very first photographer for Fairfax was a guy called George Bell. And there's a, there's a famous picture of him sitting on his horse that has decorated the workspaces of most of the places that the Herald has occupied.

He would stare down at the wall, sort of watching us and I always was marveled at how he would be able to wrangle glass plates with these very. He's got a Ross twin lens reflex camera it's big wooden thing. And I just marveled, about how he managed to ride his horse with glass plates and the camera, and he would have needed a tripod.

And it wasn't until I saw the full scan, because we had a cropped version of it on the walls at the Sydney Morning Herald that I noticed in the corner there's two horses that are quite obviously attached to a cart. So I was I was able to look at that and go, oh look, there's his support cart.

So he probably had all the glass plates and the tripod and all the rest of the, photographic ephemera that went with the job, because that was quite a cumbersome time for photography, that the shadows weren't great, they were quite slow. You couldn't freeze action. The emulsions were quite slow. And of course, the glass plates were very fragile.

So their ability to be able to technically operate and get a result from it, it's quite an amazing achievement. Yeah. When I first did it, it's very staged. And the pictures are almost mannequin like. So you can see they've taken people, you know, from the studio where they were posing for photos almost and, and put them into the environment.

And, and a lot of the early pictures have this very staged look. And, and in it, I guess, I guess they were learning how to story tell in the sense that we know it today in a photo journalistic sense. Two pictures that I think demonstrate this is taken by Herbert Henry Fishwick. He used to sign, you'll see in the corner.

H H F sort of backwards, mostly. And that was his signature signing his negatives so that we knew it was taken by him at the start of the war. There's a picture of a wounded soldier, farewelling a new conscript on a train. And it's just propaganda. That's a propaganda photo that's obviously set up. And it's, you know, adopting the, the government line, you know, the, the wounded soldier farewells the new conscript and he's got a bandage around his head.

And the same photographer in 1919 took, a group of soldiers and, and, civilians celebrating as they walk down a street in Sydney at the end of the war, and that a pure photojournalistic shot. So you can see the journey that they've taken from set up narrative that actually is propaganda to sort of documenting what's happening in front of them.

And one of the really big events, I think, that that taught them how to tell a story in a photo journalistic sense, because it was a story that had a beginning, a middle and an end was the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and it forced them to think about a narrative and how they tell the story of the building of it from, you know, the foundation stones that were first laid.

You know, through to the arch coming together, all the way through the load testing in the middle of the night where they, they popped 90 odd, steam engines on it to make sure it would take take the load and they would have to do it at night, obviously, because that's when the steam engines weren't being used.

So there's this range of pictures that we would understand today as telling a story in the classic sense that photojournalism does well. The exhibition covers that early period in news photography, where you see newspapers and journals and moving over from using illustrations, black and white illustration and drawings and, and prints and things for each actually using photography.

And of course, that took a while to develop. Photojournalism didn't arrive fully formed. It had to evolve. And this exhibition shows you how photographers using the old, technology slowly learned how to become photojournalists. So you can see some very interesting images from the early period, right through to images which are very familiar to us as examples of photojournalism in the 1940s.

One of the great things about the images in the Fairfax Photo Archive is how they can be used as historical documents. There's so much information in the visual imagery about things which happened in Australia. A really good example is the story of the Harbour Bridge. The building construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge was a major event and completely transformed Sydney.

And the photographers, working for Fairfax, were in an ideal position to record that whole story. So you could see, the beginning of the construction. You could see how the bridge changed the shape of the harbour. You can see the workers working on the bridge and on the steel. It's an amazing story and really brought to life by the beautiful photographs in the Fairfax photo archive.

Karlee Baker: Allister, I'm pretty keen to hear a little bit more from the technical side of things. Absolutely. So we might send Mike Bowers back in. And then I'm going to send you in.

Allister Mills: Sure.

Mike Bowers: And people sometimes talk about luck in photo journalism. I don't believe in it. You you can be lucky to be in the right place at the right time, but you are in the right place at the right time, with the right gear and the right exposure. And that's not luck. That is skill and determination and editorial drive to be able to tell the story.

So, there's always an element of luck in anything you do, but, you've got to be lucky enough to know what you're doing, to be able to capture it, and you have to get your exposure is really correct. My hero image, and the one I'm most in love with from this exhibition is the two guys working on the propeller of the HMAS Australia at Cockatoo Island.

Now, if they had light meters, I would have been fairly rudimentary light meters. This is, everyone knows, a formula for getting an exposure in bright sunlight. It becomes more difficult when it's not in sunlight, and that is inside that photograph. And so you would have to, by dead reckoning, more than likely know what the exposure was. And it's exposed beautifully in the tonal range and response in that print.

You know that negative has been exposed. Absolutely. Spot on. And due to the stability of glass is a medium for being able to archive and store them. It's maintained its quality. The definition is just beautiful. You could cut your finger on the sharpness of it.

Allister Mills: My name is Allister Mills. I'm one of the assistant curators on Fit to Print defining moments from the Fairfax photo archive here with you at the National Library today. I wanted to talk very briefly, about some deep looking, and some of the details that you can get from glass plate negatives when you, print them at, at, certain magnified version.

This is a photograph of, the Prince of Wales. Edward the seventh, visiting in, 1920, visiting Sydney. You can see a lot of people have turned out for the event. Then if you zoom in, if you if you take a moment with the photograph, you can see, down here that there are a few, Australian flags, with the words welcome printed on them.

Then if you pan across to this other boat here, you'll notice that there's, a woman looking. Not exactly pleased, with the events at hand. Holding an American flag.

In the early 20th century. Cameras were a lot slower. They were a lot larger than they are today. The shutter speeds are slower, and the emulsion speeds of the film that they were using was slow as well. And as a result, you often had to to ask your subject to stand still for, ten, 15 seconds or or even a couple of minutes if it was a very dark room.

What that means is a lot of these photographs were taken outside. And a lot of them are staged as well, so that you can keep your subject very still. Staged photographs don't often get used today by photojournalists for ethical reasons. But in the early 20th century, it allowed our photographers to get some beautiful shots like this.

Little slices of life. Like these children who found discarded merry go round horses. And the photographer has asked them to, to line up in a race. To take this shot.

I'll take you over here to this photograph. Of Bhola Singh. and Pritam Kaur. I want you to just very briefly, take a minute to, to look at this photograph.

If you look very closely, you'll notice that Bhola Singh actually has a medal bar. Across, the left hand side of his jacket. This photograph was taken in 1924. As he and his wife immigrated through Australia to New Zealand. But we can see from, this medal bar that he's actually a veteran of the First World War.

Glass is such a beautiful medium to take photographs on, and we can capture, a lot of detail. These women at the Randwick race course, you can, look closely and see the details. And the lacework on the veil. In this photograph of Bondi Beach, we can see the dogs and ball games are prohibited. Sign. And a young girl chasing after a ball underneath it.

In this photograph of laundry drying in Sydney backyards. We look on the roof and see, a cat taking a nap on a drying sheet.

These are the kinds of details that that you can really sink your teeth into by spending a couple of minutes with each photograph.

There was no auto mode on the cameras of the early 20th century. And any light matters that the photographers were using a rudimentary at best. And so there is a lot of calculations and mathematics that goes on in a photographer's head to, to get a correct exposure like this one. You're trying to balance out three different, and conflicting, mechanisms of the camera.

The sensitivity of the emulsion that we call ISO today. The shutter speed, and the aperture of the lens. In a photograph like this. All of those have been completely balanced. They're letting in the right amount of light for the right amount of time. But on a photograph like this photograph of, lifesavers at the beach.

You can see that the photographer has missed a little bit. The photograph is overexposed. And so the whites have really blown out, and you can't see much of the sky at all. And even the sand is is very bright.

Once a piece of film or a glass plate negative is in the back of the camera. Photojournalists can really only control the aperture or the shutter speed. To make sure that the, the negative is correctly exposed. The aperture refers to the, width of the hole in the lens. So, how much light gets through.

And that also affects the depth of field of the photograph. You'll notice some of these photographs, especially the ones inside, have a very shallow depth of field. Only a narrow plane of the photograph is in focus. And you can tell this, by the, figures in the background. How blurred they are compared to the figures in the foreground.

And even they're not very sharp.

Karlee Baker: We're getting lots of fantastic observations through about that beautiful photo there. Notice that someone has noticed that ladder in the driver's stocking. They're also thinking about the gender of the person who is being depicted in this photograph. Mike Bowers talks about this piece really beautifully, and it's a really great example of that. So looking at close looking that you're talking about also, I can also see lots of questions coming through in the Q&A and your observations.

Please keep those coming. But I wonder what Mike Bowers thinks of that fantastic photo of Jean there.

Mike Bowers: I just love it. It's beautifully composed. It's Jean Thompson, and, her husband was racing that day down at Jerragong And actually won a few of the races. She was, not only his companion, but she was also his mechanic.

And she's sitting in the cockpit of a type 37a Bugatti. Wouldn't you like to still have that car? Because it would be worth a fortune. But the thing I love about Jean sitting there, she's obviously been on a couple of runs with her husband. I would say, and, she's got a letter that runs up all the way along her, stocking on her left leg, and it's, it's just it's just a fabulous little detail that the glass plates have picked up because of the beautiful definition and tonal reproduction that they do.

And it's, it's from the very birth of, of, motorsport in Australia, which they use Jerragong Beach to race up and down. And, it's just a wonderfully historic picture. And one of the sports where women and men were, pitted against each other equally. So, a very early sport where, and they were quite a number of, female races that did very, very well.

I'm very intrigued by this photograph. There's probably about 15 laws as to why you can't trying to koala nowadays to, feed itself with a spoon. How do you start to train a koala to feed itself with a spoon? There are so many questions that this, this, picture asks that that will never be answered, but I think so.

I think this is an intriguing picture because I've never seen anything like it, and you probably won't again.

Well, on the surface, it's. It's a picture of two itinerant workers who are catching a goods train, to get from place to place and shot, during the, Great Depression, 1932. But when you start to think about it a little bit, I think there's more than meets the eye, because how did the photographer, get up on the moving train?

Did he throw his heavy bulk glass plate camera with the glass plates up onto the train? I don't think so. I think this was sort of set up. It looks to me like, this one here where they're sitting on the coils of wire, that they're actually sitting in a goods yard here and the trains not moving.

You can see that there's there's carriages and stuff in the back that, that look like that. So I just, I think they've sort of gone right. Let's pretend and, and and they're telling a story and there's a narrative here, but it's not a real story because I obviously think they're doing it for the photographer. And it was a stationary train, not a moving one.

And look, I might be wrong and I might be judging this photographer very harshly, but I don't think so.

Allister Mills: Yeah, absolutely. Mike, I think that, the real telltale giveaway for me personally, other than, the, exceptionally bright and white shirt that, one of those gentlemen has on for, an itinerant worker. If he is, then, his, launderette is doing very well. In the circumstances, is that, the, train is, very clearly quite stationary.

There's there's no movement there. So the pretending to run alongside the train, whereas in actual fact, the train isn't, isn't going anyway. We've also got some, good questions coming in. Yes, they are very staged. You can see, in that, photograph where they're running alongside the train. It's actually, a couple of swags that that's thrown, into the back of the, into the back of the train.

Probably not even the, the train that they then climbed up into to, to take their, very staged photograph resting on the coils, I imagine so, yes. Given that the cameras were quite large at the time. If the train had been moving, the, photographer would have really had to, to scramble to pack up his gear and then set it back up again on top of the train.

Karlee Baker: And something that I love coming through in your observations is that people have noticed that beautiful balance. I've noticed the composition of the pieces and that contrast. And then once I've had a little bit more of a story or kind of thought through the logistics that they've realized, that tricked me. So we've we've had a few people today that that were tricked.

I have learned a lot from listening to Mike around the composition of, of these photographs, but also that the technical side, what it would have taken to put together a beautiful photograph 100 years ago. We do have lots of questions coming through. Are you ready to take some questions?

Allister Mills: Let's answer some questions.

Karlee Baker: Let's do it. So we have a fantastic question from someone called Bec who mentioned that photojournalists don't tend to use staged photographs anymore.

Allister Mills: And maybe what those ethical considerations, how that might have changed. Absolutely. So, photojournalists, if, if they do stage a photograph, today, then, then not making any kind of pretenses, that, that the photograph is candid, like perhaps, the photographer who took the, the photograph of the men with the train, that would have been passed off as, as a real authentic, photograph, of men running alongside the train of itinerant workers.

Whereas, today, if we, if we see a photograph, in, in, newspaper, like, like that, we can assume that, it is a genuine photograph. There are obviously other, ethical implications of, of photojournalists, today, many have to do with, the consent of the subjects, of a photograph.

Most, photographers, depending on, on the context, and, and, the, the, reasonable expectations on them will, received permission, from the people, in, in the photographs that they're taking, it does become a little more fraught when we're talking about, photographers who are in war zones who, trying to capture some of those, pieces of news in more dangerous areas.

Karlee Baker: Thank you. We got a few other questions around. This is a fascinating question. Thank you so much. Are we making any mistakes with the formats we're taking and storing photos in today? Will our great grandchildren be able to access them as readily as we can with physical prints of 100 years ago. That's a really great question.

Allister Mills: And, I'll, speak to that. But I'll very briefly, kind of say that, that, these prints that are in the exhibition, have all been printed, for the purposes of the exhibition. They've all been scanned from negatives. So even the, the formats of, of 100 years ago aren't necessarily that straightforward to access.

Obviously there's no kind of proprietary software. That is required to, to view a glass plate negatives. But, it's not necessarily as straightforward as, just taking a print out of, a box, though, prints are, by far and away the easiest medium, to access. You don't need a computer.

You don't need any particular software to access, pieces of paper. If you can print your photographs, if you do have the capacity to print your photographs and somebody stole them, then it's probably going to be the best way to store your photographs long term. The other thing to consider is the file type in which, you're storing, your medium, or your photographs, nonproprietary file types tend to be accessible, more readily than proprietary file types.

So a, file type that, is owned by a company, might, lose support. Whereas an open source and non proprietary file type is likely to be supported, for longer and have the capacity to, to kind of hand over support to third parties or just kind of interested, persons who, who, want to keep, support for that file type going.

Karlee Baker: Thank you. We have a question around the breadth of this incredible archive and collection, and then the ones we've chosen to be on display. So I might, jump online. Yeah. As you talk through that very tricky part of the question, how do you choose?

Allister Mills:Oh my goodness. So the, the Fairfax glass plate negative archive holds 18,006, glass plate negatives.

They, mostly, on a size called quarter plate, which is about eight by 11cm. And, there are, about 150 of them, on display. Choosing them was, a really kind of lengthy process. Mike, and myself and Dr Guy Hansen, the director of exhibitions, went through, large portions, if not the whole collection.

And there are a number of ways that, that we did this. The first is, is, just, opening up, the collection on, the library's catalogue, and looking through them on Trove. Seeing, what takes our fancy kind of, finding, photographs that are, immediately striking, and and, can tell a story.

Others, took a little bit of of digging. The advanced search function, has a, a really great, field, the, the, curl number field, where we can add, the collection number of the Fairfax archive and start to search, through, the collection by subject matter, using, the subjects or the all fields.

Karlee Baker: Right. Well, we might have a little, look at that, because it's really important here at the library. We are very keen to make sure everyone can access the collection, access to these incredible pieces that we're talking about, but also so that you can continue your own research. I know that Mike Bowers says, oh, how wonderful it would be if we could match up all of these pieces in the archive to the news event that they were connected with.

So that might be an individual research task for somebody. But here I am on our website, and Allister, I'm not sure if this is the way that you would access the fantastic images that we have, but this is how I do it. I go through our exhibitions because I know that we've got lots of exhibitions on. So here I am at our Fit to Print web page and to find out more.

Tab actually gives me the item checklist, which is just incredible. There's 150 pieces that ended up in the show here on this list. So I think for someone like Herbert Henry Fishwick, if we have a look at this beautiful piece of his, what I just find incredible is how clearly I can see these workers faces. Yeah. Can you tell me about how we get such incredible detail in these pieces?

Allister Mills: Because I've been digitized forever. Now. Yes. They have been, so, they've been digitised since around 2012 when we, with, generously, donated the collection, from Fairfax Media. The, the, the clarity that that you can see in these images, really comes from, the size of the negatives. These were, as I said, digitised, about 13 years ago.

And there is kind of a limit to, what you can achieve with, with scanning, especially, scanning, negative, or, a piece of film, at some point, scanning, an image or a negative at a high resolution isn't actually going to, provide you with, more detail. It will just provide you with a file that's bigger in size, but it doesn't provide any more, clarity of the image.

And so the, the clarity really comes from the size of the negative. And, and in these cases, as I said, the negatives, are about eight by 11cm, which is is quite large. When you compare it to the kind of 35 millimeter film we remember from the 90s. Thank you. What I also love about Trove, of course, is that I could download that image.

Karlee Baker: I'm just going to take you back to that fantastic list, because I remembered you saying that there were staged photographs, and I wanted to see if there if I could find a few more, particularly with children. Because that is a really great way, because usually children are very fast, in my opinion. So to for those photographers to be able to get such clear images, I really want to look at how they're getting those staged pictures.

I'm going to do a control F that means that I can search through this page for perhaps some children contemplating, I believe that there are children on a billycart. Let me have a look at that one. Because if I click through here, I'm on Trove. A really get to the look. Look at that dog! The wind must be blowing through its hairs at that speed.

But hang on if I head down. But, there we go. Okay. Staged photograph. Fantastic. So if I did want to have a a look at a few more of this incredible collection wherein the entire collection on Trove. Now, so you mentioned that there were 18,004 images. So that would be a great place to start to head through.

Allister Mills: But we do have a few more questions around with all of those glass plate photos have been scanned into the digital format. Yes. So, the entire, Fairfax Classified negative archive has been scanned and digitised and is available on Trove. I can, see there are some other questions. Were all of the photos taken in New South Wales?

Allister Mills: Not all of them were taken in New South Wales. But, as Fairfax in the early 20th century, mostly operated out of, Sydney. Most of the photographs in the collection, taken in New South Wales, there are, written stories that accompany, some of the photographs, they can be found, you know, exhibition space.

And we will look forward to, hopefully, having a virtual tour, of the exhibition on our website. Soon, there is a catalog available. And, it's available through our bookstore, online at the moment. Fantastic. Well, I think brings us to the end of our time today. I think we we probably should end on this one before we give Mike Bowers his final thoughts.

But thinking about how members of the public can use these photos. Yeah, absolutely. So, Jane asks, are you still able to get glass plates printed? And, these particular glass plates, because they've already been digitized, you can request copies for personal use, through our catalog. If you find, an image that you like, there's an order, a copy button, on our catalog that will take you, to our digitization on demand services, where you can receive either a digital file or print.

Can the public use these photos or do they have to be paid for to use? That's a great question. And, so I do, urge you, to reach out to our rights management team, if you, are interested in using these photographs, for purposes other than a personal use, there are certain licensing agreements that we do have, with my own media that might, require, pay to use, for some of the photographs.

And Alex asks, subject terms added to a catalog records in order to yield accurate search results when people search for, So, that's, a bit of a tricky question. Our subject's terms are added in order to yield accurate search results. When people are searching, the library catalog, those results will appear in Trove.

But, first and foremost, Trove is is for digitized collections, that, include things like, the newspapers, newspapers aren't necessarily, don't necessarily have subject terms, added to them, by the National Library. There are a number of, dedicated users who will tag an article, with the subject term but the subject terms that appear in our catalog are there to help, find, stuff more accurately, through the National Library's catalog.

Karlee Baker: Okay. Thank you very much. Okay. If you do have some other burning questions that you think of, you can send any of those through to learning@nla.gov that I you all make sure we pass it on to our staff. But the the web page is incredibly informative. I love the curator's essay, I love looking through that one.

So I'm sure most people in here today have had a little look today. So we will leave you with Mike Bowers' final thoughts. And I would like to say thank you very much for joining us today.

Mike Bowers: I think the importance of this collection as an archive. One of the pioneering women publishers is Katharine Graham, who who was publisher of The Washington Post during the 70s after her husband died in the mid 60s. And in her book, she quotes her husband, Philip Graham, as saying that the news in a newspaper is the first rough draft of history.

I think that about a journalism like this is the receipts for that first rough draft, and it forms an indelible collection of receipts that prove this happened at that time. And along with the story. You know, you don't know the complete story behind that, but it helps to add to the body of evidence that these things occurred. And, thank goodness the National Library has it because it'll be preserved for future generations to come and look and and interpret.