professional photographer, naturalist, ornithologist and publican, was in South Australia by 25 August 1842 when he married Ruth Smith. They had four (surviving?) children. Hall began his photographic career in Adelaide as an agent for Edward Schohl but was advertising his willingness to take his own daguerreotypes in April 1846, having just purchased a French camera from S.T. Gill . That November he visited Fremantle and Perth for eight days, long enough to take the colony’s first recorded photographs. All were undoubtedly portraits, although no examples have been identified. His advertisement in the Perth Inquirer gave a long technical explanation of the daguerreotype process which, Hall proclaimed, offered 'a fidelity of representation … entirely beyond the power of any artist’. He asked his sitters not to wear white.
Afterwards Hall returned to Adelaide. Presumably he was the Mr Hall who, in partnership with Thomas Hall Plush, gave 'a satisfactory exhibition of their dissolving view apparatus and phantasmagoria’ in February 1847. He exhibited daguerreotype portraits of Lord Brougham and of four South Australian Aborigines at the Exhibition of Colonial Artists held later that year. His studio was in Morphett Street in 1848, the year he showed daguerreotypes of Government House, Trinity Church, the Bank of South Australia and the Exchange building at Adelaide’s second art exhibition.
After revisiting England in the early 1850s, Hall advertised in August 1854 that he had just returned to Adelaide and was about to open a portrait studio where he would employ the daguerreotype, calotype, talbotype and collodion processes and take stereoscopic pictures. Meanwhile, he was selling stereoscopic pictures and photographic views of Europe from his temporary residence in Currie Street. He opened his studio in North Terrace in November 1854, but the following year re-established himself at 83 Hindley Street and remained there for the next ten years. He was Adelaide agent for Baxter prints and possibly sold paintings from his shop as well. In 1859 he purchased Alexander Schramm 's Group of Natives for 5 guineas.
At its inaugural soirée on 29 January 1861 the South Australian Institute displayed a 'numerous collection of superior photographs’ lent by Hall. By December 1862 he was offering photographic portraits overpainted in oils, the painting being done by 'a young Danish artist’ he employed. In May 1864 the South Australian Register noted that Hall had forwarded 'two interesting memorials of the once numerous and warlike Murray blacks’ to the newspaper, presumably two of his 1847 daguerreotypes. He won prizes for photographic views and for stereographs at the 1865 exhibition of the Society of Arts. After his death in 1866 an auction was held in his recently occupied King William Street studio to dispose of his 'large quantity of photographic materials’, including 'six splendid painted scenes for Backgrounds’.
Until the arrival of the Duryea brothers in 1855 'Professor’ Hall, as he styled himself, was the leading photographer in Adelaide. Yet few examples of his work have been identified. The R.J. Noye Collection (Mortlock Library) contains some rather poor quality photographs, while his portrait of the explorer John McDouall Stuart (1863) is held by the Royal Commonwealth Society, London.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
