professional photographer, was working in 1867 at 200 Pitt Street, Sydney, in partnership with Walter Rice . He had his own Sydney studio in the 1870s, was at 115 Botany Road in 1879 and in Sutherland Street, Paddington, in 1882 91. In 1872 fourteen stereoscopic views by Brodie of 'the City, suburbs and harbour of Sydney’ were published by J.R. Clarke. A tiny album of carte-de-visite views of Sydney is in the Historic Photograph Collection (SU).
Turner & Henderson published fourteen of Brodie’s stereo photographs at Sydney in 1875 as Album of Views of New South Wales . Included were scenes taken in the Blue Mountains at the time of the first of the artists’ camps in the Grose Valley set up by Eccleston Du Faur (a founder of the New South Wales Geographical Society and a trustee of the National Art Gallery) in hopes of promoting the mountains as a tourist resort. The camps were intended for painters (especially W.C. Piguenit ) as well as for photographers. Du Faur paid Joseph Bischoff £40 to prepare photographs of the valley for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition, but Brodie, who worked on a smaller scale, is unlikely to have been paid. At a conversazione held by the NSW Academy of Art on 10 November 1875, Du Faur admitted that neither photographer had successfully captured the sublime qualities of the place. He thought Brodie’s details 'perfect’ but complained that his plates were 'not of a size worthy of the subjects’. Nevertheless, both sets of photographs were sent to Philadelphia. There they attracted no attention whatsoever, the exhibition being full of much larger and more dramatic American landscape photographs.
Brodie was also a professional musician, playing drums for Sydney’s Theatre Royal for over fifteen years. He died at the Lyceum Theatre on 17 October 1894 after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while playing the big drum during a concert.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2018
