page_title: John William Lindt
section_title: Melbourne
hierarchical_section_title: John William Lindt / Melbourne
caption_attribution_description: English: Bushranger and Kelly Gang member Joe Byrne's body propped up against the wall of the Benalla Police Station.
context_page_description: John William Lindt, FRGS, was a German-born Australian landscape and ethnographic photographer, early photojournalist, and portraitist.
context_section_description: Lindt moved to Melbourne in 1876 where he worked for Batchelder & Co. before opening his own opulent studios at number 7 at the top of Collins Street opposite the Treasury, in 1877. His cartes-de-visite had printed "J. W. Lindt, Photographer, Prize Medallist Philadelphia, Sydney, Brisbane, Paris, 7 Collins Street, Melbourne" on the back. At a time of great wealth in Melbourne lavishly appointed studios were a sign of the rising status of photography in Australia, as elsewhere, and Lindt's studio was a prime example; his apprentice Herman Carl Krutli, who first visited within its third year remembered the ‘rich crimson velvet pile carpet of the reception room’ and posing for Lindt's first dry plate exposure in 1880. Lindt's business of this period was wide-ranging, and included portraits, records of Melbourne public buildings and streetscapes, the Botanical Gardens, and Port Melbourne. Tall and prepossessing, Lindt is remembered in 1955 by Jack Cato in this colourful description in his The Story of the Camera in Australia:
   "he was a man of great dignity, but he was simply a great MAN [sic] and wherever he happened to be he was as obvious as a mountain in a desert. He was a handsome giant with a barrel of a chest, a dark sandy beard, and a mass of strong hair. He had high principles and all the fine virtues of the mid-nineteenth century German; was shrewd in business and industrious; a lover of music, fluent in four languages, and possessing a quality of charm which brought him friends in high places. He loved congenial company, was impatient with bores, could also be over-forceful and dominating, and never far away was that touch of austerity which, in his later years, was to turn him into something of a recluse."
  He was a welcome photographer of members of parliament and other Melbourne personalities, their society and cultural life including the theatre, and was known as a ‘rich man’s photographer’ for those whose families he grouped informally on the lawns in front of their mansions, with servants at the rails of the upstairs balconies. He continued with landscape, producing folios Fernshaw and Watt River Scenery, Victoria ( c.1878-82), Scenery on the Ovens and Buckland Rivers, Victoria (c.1878–82) and Lorne, Louttit Bay and Cape Otway Ranges (1883).  Sales of his Black Spur scenery amounted to approximately 25,000 copies printed from the original negatives between 1882 and 1892. 
  In June 1880 a Melbourne newspaper commissioned Lindt to document the capture of the notorious bush-rangers, the Kelly gang in Glenrowan, Victoria. Arriving after the event, Lindt produced a wet plate image Body of Joe Byrne, member of the Kelly gang, hung up for photography, outside the Benalla lock-up. His panoramic image, made on 29 June, encompasses the Victorian government photographer A.W. Burman (son of William Insull Burman ), the artist Julian Ashton sketching Byrne’s body for the Illustrated Sydney News, with casual bystanders. It is amongst his most famous images and has been hailed as the earliest press photograph taken in Australia.
  During the early 1880s Lindt contemplated exchanging his career from photographer to photographic supplier, after his return abroad the Liguria on August 31, 1881 from visiting Europe to source the latest photographic equipment, Lindt became sole Australian agent for numerous studio suppliers, including Enholtz’s scenic backgrounds. Thus keeping abreast of developments in the medium, from about 1881 he was using the recently introduced Voigtländer Euryscope lenses on his Haake & Albers’ studio cameras, and to produce enlargements. He quickly adopted the commercial dry plates which he ordered from England soon after they became commercially available. An accomplished technician, he readily adapted and invented equipment to suit his needs. From 1884 operated a second studio installed behind his newly acquired estate; ‘Ethelred’ in Hawthorn, in order to accommodate the high demand for his work.
caption: J.W. Lindt (1880) Body of Joe Byrne, member of the Kelly gang, hung up for photography, outside the Benalla lock-up.
exif: {"Image Copyright": "State Library of Victoria"}