painter and professional photographer, began his photographic career at West Maitland, New South Wales. The Maitland Ensign of 6 March 1861 noted that Audet’s Photographic Gallery had just reopened with improvements after being damaged by a storm, so he could have arrived much earlier. At this time Audet was offering 'Portraits in every style of the Art, including Alabaster Portraits, Stereoscopic Negatives and Positives’. He also produced portraits on cloth which could be sent through the post.
In 1864 Audet was advertising from his studio in High Street, Maitland, 'that having paid a large premium for learning the art of Sennotype, he can produce a Picture for softness, delicacy, beauty and durability surpassing the most elaborately executed Ivory painting’. He also provided plain and coloured cartes-de-visite 'taken in the newest style’ and offered a mail-order service for 'parties in the interior’.
In the Maitland Ensign of 20 January 1866 Audet claimed (inaccurately) that he was 'the only sennotype artist in the colony’, adding that his principle was 'a good likeness or no charge’. Advertising 'a novelty in photography’, the diamond cameo portrait, he explained that this presented four different views of a sitter’s face and was taken with a camera he had invented himself.
By 1869 he was running The Photographic and Fine Arts Gallery in Hunter Street, Newcastle. Here he again produced photographs in a variety of styles and formats: cartes-de-visite, cabinet pictures, glass pictures (ambrotypes) and stereoscopic portraits and views, as well as life-size portraits, either plain or coloured in crayon and oil, enlarged 'by the solar or direct process’—not to mention his well-known sennotypes, 'for which so much praise has been given to Mr Audet by the Sydney and local papers’. Audet’s studio was in George Street, Newcastle, in 1879 80, at 28 Foster Street in 1883 84.
According to Audet’s son, a building contractor of West Maitland, Mrs Jacob Audet (née Elizabeth Moss) was also a photographer. He believed her to be the first woman photographer in New South Wales, but the firm’s dates make this impossible. Mr Audet added that the Maitland photographer Morris Moss (possibly an in-law) had trained in his father’s studio.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 1989
