lifeasdaddy

#CommonGround @ the Powerhouse Museum. Part 3. Where did the Ashfield bandstand come from?.

I'm celebrating the generosity of the National Library of Australia.  

The people in the Pictures Branch of the NLA have sent me a high resolution copy of an image to use during my talk next Saturday night.

It's not this one, but here's a photograph from the Powerhouse Museum's Tyrrell photography collection of a bandstand in Ashfield:

It is an extraordinary structure.  I've never seen anything else like it being used as a bandstand in Australia.

Significantly it is topped by a crown showing some sort of Royal connection.  This is an important clue.

Notes online at the Powerhouse Museum only date the photograph between 1859 and 1917.

Now, the suburb of Ashfield in New South Wales is certainly a grand place however it seemed unlikely to me that it had been the scene of a royal visit in the early part of the 1900s.  So the crown on the structure is therefore out of place.

A while back I decided  to find out more, and eventually tracked down a pamphlet issued by the Ashfield Council which stated that the bandstand had been used in Federation Celebrations as a pavilion for the welcome of Lord Hopetoun, Australia's first Governor-General.

It was recycled as the bandstand in 1903!

But what did it originally look like?

The best place to find out was to try and locate it on Picture Australia.

If we search for "Lord Hopetoun 1901"  the first result returned is "Landing of Lord Hopetoun, Sydney 1901", and we find out the image is at the National Library of Australia.

Going direct to the website of the National Library of Australia, we find an even better photograph composed of two images side by side to create a panorama:

( Landing of Governor-General, Farm Cove, Commonwealth celebrations, [1901] [picture])

The State Library of New South Wales also has a good view of the original pavilion here; and at Ashfield here.

An architectural mystery solved.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you.  You can't find this bandstand in Ashfield anymore.  It was demolished in the 1940s due to terminal decay.

My talk @ the Powerhouse Museum's #CommonGround event. Part 2: Requests for images.

I ain't too proud to beg, sweet darlin'

As I said,  I've been asked to speak this coming Saturday night at the Powerhouse Museum's piece of the global Flickr Common Ground event.

There's going to be an outdoor image slideshow using giant projection onto the outside of the Powerhouse Museum's mothership building in Ultimo.  See the test projections here.  It's going to be big in every way.

I've been selecting images to project during my talk, which are from The Commons on Flickr.  All except for four images.

The images I want have to be in high resolution format so that they can make a reasonable showing on the giant screening surface. 

As you may know, the custodians of the such iconic photographic images usually licence the images for use at a fee.  Sometimes the fee is high, sometimes less so.

Since my speaking fee for this engagement is a big fat zero, I'm going to try to get the images I need for a commensurate sum.  Also zero.

The first two images I need are of Roger Fenton's iconic 1855 Crimean War photographs usually known as The Valley of the Shadow of Death.  Lots of institutions have a copy of one of his photos, but only one that I know of has both images with cannon balls on and off the road.  The photos I'm talking about are shown near the top of Erroll Morris's blog post for the New York Times here.

They are credited to the Harry Ransome Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.  So I've sent a begging email to the Curator of Photography for high resolution electronic copies of the two photographs.  And I politely  requested expeditious consideration due to the time constraints.

Secondly, I need to use a wonderful image of 1901 Federation Celebrations.  This one held at the National Library of Australia.  So I've asked them to come to the party too.

The last non-Commons image I need is held by State Records New South Wales, our state archives.  It's one of Bennelong Point seen here on Flickr, and here at their Photo Investigator site.  And I ain't too proud to beg.  I know that State Records NSW is very interested in becoming involved in social media, so I'm quite hopeful they'll help spread the joy.  Check out their very fine blog, Archives Outside, including an example of dating a photograph by the length of shadows in the photograph.

Let's see how far the love spreads.

I'm tagging my blog posts on this topic here as #CommonGround.

You can also follow progress on twitter at #CommonGround.

Here's how the image projections are going to look in the forecourt of the Powerhouse Museum:

(Above image used with permission of Paula Bray )