photographer and lawyer, was born at Thornthwaite in New South Wales, eldest son of the second marriage of Joseph Docker. He was photographing with his father from about 1855, producing mainly calotypes (salted paper prints). In 1857 Ernest gave a lecture in Sydney on stereo-photography, and within a year he and his father were experimenting with the wet-plate process. Ernest exhibited 12 landscape photographs and 12 stereographs at the 1870 Sydney Intercolonial Exhibition from his father’s home in Macleay Street, Sydney (now Potts Point), where he also lived. On 19 July 1872 a group of amateur photographers, with Docker as chairman, met at the Oxford Hotel in King Street and formed themselves into the 'Amateur Photographic Society of New South Wales’. Indeed, the society, modelled on that in England, appears to have been established almost entirely on Docker’s initiative. Its aims included exchanging negatives and holding monthly meetings to 'improve their knowledge of the art’. Annual subscriptions were determined at a guinea, and eleven of the fourteen gentlemen present joined up.
As well as becoming a Supreme Court judge in Sydney, Ernest Docker was the first president of the Photographic Society of New South Wales in 1894, delivering a lecture on stereo-photography to the society’s members in 1896. He showed photographs in the society’s exhibitions and remained president until 1907. Articles by Docker were published in the British Journal of Photography in the 1870s and in the Sydney Town and Country Journal; a description of his trip to the south coast with a half-plate camera appeared in the latter in 1892. He also developed an original method of dry-plate photography, illustrated by a series of river scenes published in 1908 in the Australian Photographic Journal, which also published his article on mounting stereographs, a photographic form that was always his speciality. He took hundreds of views on his excursions and travels and many survive. Before his death at the age of 84, Docker had made a complete series of views of the Blue Mountains, Warrumbungle Ranges, Nandewar Ranges, the Victorian Riverina, Tasmania, New Zealand and Norfolk Island.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
