Ralph Snowball was a Newcastle based photographer whose stylish glass plates help us glimpse the past.
One of the men in this photograph, the white bearded one propping up the far right post, is my great great grandfather, Robert Cunningham Watt. The year is 1890 and he was the proprietor of the Watt Family Hotel at Islington, an inner city suburb of Newcastle. Both he and the hotel are long gone but I can look at his achievements and get a sense of him because of this captured moment in time.
Coal & Community
The photographer of this image was Hunter local, Ralph Snowball. Snowball was born in the English mining village of Leadgate, Durham in 1849. At age 30, he immigrated, with his wife and son, to the Australian coal port of Newcastle. Initially, he continued to work as a coal miner but by the mid 1880s he had given that away to embark on full time career in photography.
Snowball advertised himself as an architecture and landscape photographer with a home studio in the mining suburb of Lambton. But his subjects were substantially more broader than that. In fact, Snowball's photography is a comprehensive social study of a working class town in the colonies. Snowball's subjects ranged the social spectrum from miners and dock workers, to small businessmen and high society. In Snowball's photographs we see the city's inhabitants at work and at play, men in front of steam engines and mine shafts, but also at home, having a game of tennis and on industry picnics.
Snowball's photographs regularly illustrated the local newspapers, capturing festivals and social events and documenting the construction of landmark buildings, such as the Cathedral, and the infrastructure projects of his rapidly developing city.
Although he had a studio, most of his photography occurred outdoors and on location.. He took his camera into the workplaces, parks, pubs and streets to capture images of his fellow Novacastrians in their own environment, under natural light. and often mid event. By going out into the street, and not confining his portraits of people to the studio, Snowball provides us with a full portrait of a city, a visual anthropology of daily life and identity in 19th century Australia.
A Window Through Time
People are very much the focus of Snowball's photography. They fill the space in front of buildings, luxuriate on lawns, and spread out over building sites. There are people taking tea in their gardens, hoeing the fields, drawn out from the bar beers in hand, riding to school, rowing a boat, working at the slaughterhouse, in mines, on railways. He ensures we find them paused in action.
Some are dressed for the occasion while others are completely comfortable in their everyday working clothes, sleeves rolled up, dust on their trousers, carrying the tools of their trade. There are blacksmiths hammers, butcher aprons, bustles, bow ties and bonnets. The clarity of the images allows us to explore the fashions and trades of a bygone era across a broad spectrum of society.
What is most striking though is the casual poses of his subjects, the captured character. The cocky stance, their fearless arrogance, cigarettes hanging from the corners of their mouths, women's warm smiles. They lean against posts, sit in their drays, wide legged, hands on hips and often angled obstinately in profile away from the camera. These people were clearly comfortable on film. And given most would probably have never seen a camera - photography was still reserved for the avid or the wealthy - it says a lot for the personality of the photographer to put them at ease like this.
In those days, photographs were not instant; the person had to hold the pose. Occasionally we can see, in the arms of a woman or in the corner of the street, a ghostly young toddler or dog who didn't manage to stay still long enough. But most do. Most have a fixed down-the-barrel stare that reaches the viewer across decades and generations. It's as if they are as curious about us as we are of them.
Snowball's skill with his subjects, his ability to artfully manage the casual pose, provides us the impression that, in this quiet moment when they are so perfectly still, he has actually frozen time. His subjects stare into the future, we stare back into the past. A curious window through time where, in that candid moment, we glimpse not only their pursuits but their personalities.
The Magic of Glass Plate Photography
Snowball used a technique known as 'wet glass plate negative' photography. This definitely wasn't a method for a quick and candid street photographer. It involved coating a pane of glass (he used two sizes 21.6x16.5cm or 16.5x12.7cm) with an emulsion before sliding it into the large, tripod mounted box camera. Each exposure took several seconds to capture, requiring subjects to stay perfectly still. After exposing the photograph the negative needed to be developed immediately by washing the plate in a series of solutions in his carriage.
There's something etherial about glass plate photography. The chemical wash creates a luminance, giving the image that stylish, high contrast gloss. The translucent nature of the glass provides such a level of clarity and depth that photographs obtain a unique three dimensionality. The viewer doesn't merely look at the photo; they look into it.
While fixed subjects in the foreground are generally sharp, the far horizons fade off into the natural haze. Due to the long exposure required to take the photo, any soft movement of air, dust and person creates a soft vignette around the edges adding to that magical 'frozen in a moment' feel.
"Photography has the capacity to provide images of man and his environment that are both works of art and moments in history." Cornell Capa
A Social Anthropology
There are few photographers who allow us to really look back into the Victorian era to see a time and place in all it's uncompromising social structure and with such touching realism and personality. Importantly, Snowball captured the people who would otherwise be forgotten, in their workplaces, at their events; both the mundane and the fun.
Snowball's works aren't always perfect. The Australian sunlight is harsh and unforgiving to a photographer, even in modern circumstances let alone managing long exposures and wet plates out of the back of a horse and buggy. His high contrast monotones are often overexposed, losing the highlights and sometimes stealing the background detail of an image. And of course they've been damaged over the years by a less than ideal storage situation. Still, anything lost through the technical is more than made up for in the aesthetic and the historical.
Snowball took literally thousands of photos of the Newcastle-Hunter region. In fact, when historians Norm Barney and Bert Lovett unearthed his collection in the 1990s it consisted of an astounding 8000 glass plates.
We are lucky to have any of them. Earmarked for demolition, Snowball's home-studio on Clarence / Gwydir Rds, Lambton had long been abandoned and overgrown. Thankfully, just before it was demolished, Barney and Lovett, working on a family tip-off, liberated his horde of glass plates from under the front verandah where they had been left since the photographer's death in 1925. About 2000 were lost due to damage but the remainder were cleaned, identified and handed over to Newcastle University which has continued to curate, conserve and digitalise the collection.
Today, thanks to the Newcastle University's Living History's project, we can view over 1000 of these images online in the CLN Ralph Snowball Collection.
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