sketcher and professional photographer, worked for Thomas Glaister in Sydney before opening a photographic gallery at Brisbane in November 1857 in the former Albert Street premises of John Wheeler . He offered ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, talbotypes and collodiotypes, on glass and paper, 'crayon’ (probably pastel) coloured portraits and stereotypes. He promised 'Instantaneous Pictures’ in the Moreton Bay Courier of 26 December 1857 and 20 January 1858, relocating his expanding business to George Street, opposite the Immigration Department, between the two advertisements. This gallery was especially fitted out with the newest equipment and named, like Glaister’s, The Excelsior Photographic Gallery. He began 'gradually accumulating at his studio facsimiles of all the well known characters about Brisbane’ and by April 1858 these included the entrepreneur J.C. Pearce, Mr Brown (either the police magistrate or 'the people’s auctioneer’), Dean Rigney (the Catholic priest), the visiting Hungarian violinist Miska Hauser, and Sydney’s well-known Presbyterian minister, Dr J.D. Lang.
Leaving for Sydney in March 1858, Brissenden travelled via Ipswich and stopped at various stations and towns on the Darling Downs en route. For several months he ran a studio in Nicholas Street, Ipswich (afterwards taken over by his assistant, John Bowdich ). At Drayton the 'district celebrities’ he photographed included Messrs Pearce, Cobham, Kennedy and Joseph King, as well as an unnamed 'portrait of one of the Ipswich “exquisites”—the pet of the petticoats’, said to recall to mind 'what one could imagine to be the style, attitude and costume of Beau Brummel, but lacking that aristocratic look and hauteur’. He also photographed 'equine favourites’.
Brissenden claimed to be expert in all known photographic processes but especially recommended the glass-plate negative process for portraits, stating in an Ipswich advertisement (which spelt out the virtues of the respective processes) that, with him, the collodiotype had been 'brought to the highest perfection, and can be applied to slate, wood, or in fact to any substance on which a Shadow can be cast’. As well as displaying local identities at his studio, he took 'Views of buildings, Country Seats, Statuary, Paintings, Pictures of all kinds, Medallions, &c’. With his local competitor William T. Bennett he was responsible for popularising photography in the Moreton Bay region.
Back at Sydney in 1859, Brissenden is believed to have sold stereoscopic views of colonial scenery through the publisher and art dealer Jacob Richard Clarke, including views of Ben Lomond Station. He was again at Ipswich in 1863. His son, Edwin Mayhew Brissenden, subsequently a well-known Sydney lawyer, was born there in November.
- Writers:
- Fisher, Rod
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
