photographer, was a Melbourne photographer working aboard HMS Curaç oa when the ship was in the South Seas in 1865. Julius L. Brenchley, a passenger on board, noted that when he arrived at the village of Fungatele on the island of Tutuila 'all dripping with rain’, 'I entered the nearest house and found there Mr Carr [sic], our photographer, busy dressing the wounds in one hand and leg which he got in scaling the heights’. Brenchley returned to the ship at about 2 p.m. leaving Kerr 'still trying to obtain some photographic sketches’.
In November 1865 the commander of the Curaç oa , Captain W.S. Wiseman , exhibited over 1200 'curiosities’ from the South Seas at the Diocesan Book Repository, Sydney, including eighty-seven photographs of natives, missionaries and buildings of the Pacific islands (including Norfolk) and a photograph of the Curaç oa at Farm Cove, Sydney Harbour. No photographer was acknowledged and Brenchley’s book, Jottings during the Cruise of H.M.S. Curaç oa among the South Sea Islands in 1865 (London 1873) was illustrated with a few vignettes after Foljambe and a large number of woodcuts engraved by G. Pearson 'from photographs made upon the spot’. The illustrations are mainly of native people such as the king and queen of Tonga – the latter, in Brenchley’s words, 'a most portly personage’. A number of the photographs on which Pearson based his drawings survive in one of the Macarthur family albums (ML) along with others taken on the 1865 voyage; none are acknowledged. (The album also includes photographs of the Pitcairn Islanders taken by Arthur Onslow .)
Kerr was apparently aboard only for the duration of this single voyage during which he seems to have taken all the very competent photographs produced, despite the fact that Lieutenant M.S. Guy , a member of Wiseman’s survey staff, was also a photographer. When the Illustrated London News published an engraving on 24 April 1869 of The King of the Feejee Islands , a portrait of King Thackenban, it was acknowledged as being after a photograph taken by 'Mr Kerr, of Melbourne, the photographic artist who accompanied “H.M.S. Curaçoa” in her cruise among the South Sea Islands in 1865’.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
