professional photographer, was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on New Year’s Day 1845, son of Peter Joseph Lindt, a customs officer, and Justine, née Rambach. He came to Melbourne in November 1862, aged seventeen, having worked his passage out on a Dutch ship, and was soon travelling around bush townships in Victoria and New South Wales as a piano-tuner and repairer. Stopping at Grafton, New South Wales, he became photographic assistant to Conrad Wagner from whom he learned his craft. Soon after a brief trip back to Europe in 1867 68 Lindt took over as manager of the Grafton studio. On 20 September 1869 he became a naturalised British citizen.
The Grafton studio was so successful that early in 1870 Lindt opened a new and more luxurious one in Prince Street. He married Wagner’s daughter, Anna Maria Dorothea, on 13 January 1872. His well-advertised business produced photographs of steamers on the Clarence River, wool drays, sheep stations and local gold-mines, as well as 'Portraits in any size and style of the Art, equal to Sydney Houses. Large instantaneous pictures of horses and cattle’. His extensive travels in 1870 73 resulted in views of small townships, view pictures, mining scenes and group photographs.
Lindt’s studio portraits of Clarence River Aborigines—twelve are assembled in his Album of Australian Aboriginals (1880)—were considered by contemporaries to be 'the first successful attempt at representing the native blacks truthfully as well as artistically’. This desired combination of art and nature was rarely possible when posing Aboriginal groups in the natural environment (because of the long exposure times and the transport and developing problems associated with the wet-plate process). Whereas the fifty men in his outdoor photograph Aboriginal Corroboree are all stiffly posed in lines, Lindt’s studio settings paradoxically gave detail, character and personality to his sitters, reinstating (or fictionally creating) an independent and exotic lifestyle of interest to white settlers once few signs of it remained around them.
These Aboriginal tableaux were so admired and considered so true to nature that the New South Wales government purchased copies of the album for presentation to 'various scientific institutions in the old country’. The Museum of Mankind, the Royal Anthropological Institute, the Royal Commonwealth Society (in London) and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford all hold copies; a set acquired by Von Hégel on his 1874 77 visit to the South Pacific is in the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.
Lindt won a silver medal for his photographs from the New South Wales Academy of Art in April 1876, by which time he had moved to Melbourne. Initially he worked for Batchelder & Co. (see William J. Stubbs) but within a year he had opened his own opulent studios in Collins Street and was soon photographing everything associated with the booming city: large banks, new public buildings, the Botanical Gardens, bustling Port Melbourne, members of parliament and many other Melbourne people. The wide variety of subject matter was his especial strength. A newspaper commissioned him to record the capture of the Kelly gang at Glenrowan in 1880, resulting in Lindt taking, on 29 June, what has become in retrospect his most famous single photograph. It shows the strung-up body of Joe Byrne being photographed outside the Benalla lock-up by the Victorian government photographer A.W. Burman (son of William Insull Burman ) and in the manner of much later press photographs incorporates casual bystanders—and the artist Julian Ashton who had been sketching Byrne’s body for the Illustrated Sydney News .
This was a wet-plate albumen print, but Lindt had already (in March 1880) started to work with dry-plate negatives ordered from England soon after they became commercially available. He imported much of his own equipment throughout his career and was sole Australian agent for many photographic products. Having invented an improved method for making enlargements, he boasted that he often cleared the cost of a new painted backdrop 'out of the first available sitter by chancing a large picture when only a cabinet was required’. He said that he aimed to produce negatives 'as nearly as possible perfect in expression, lighting and pose’, and surviving negatives and prints are of excellent quality. The La Trobe Library holds the most comprehensive collection.
Lindt was official photographer for the 1888 Melbourne Centennial International Exhibition where he was awarded a gold medal for his photographs. He always exhibited extensively – at Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide, Philadelphia, Paris, Christchurch, Amsterdam, Frankfurt-am-Main, Calcutta and Vienna – and won many awards including at least twenty first prizes. On a visit to Europe in 1887 he was appointed a judge for the General International Photographic Exhibition at his birthplace, Frankfurt-am-Main. With his friend and fellow photographer Nicholas John Caire , he was selected as a judge for the Intercolonial Exhibition and Photographic Congress held in 1896, a disillusioning experience, he later commented.
A keen ethnographer in nineteenth-century style, Lindt undertook three expeditions, to New Guinea in 1885, to the New Hebrides in 1890 and to Fiji in 1892, in order to make a documentary survey of the native peoples and to satisfy his curiosity about their ways of life. As a result of being appointed official photographer by the New Guinea Expedition leader Sir Peter Scratchley, he produced several hundred original photographs and a book entitled Picturesque New Guinea (London 1897).
The depression forced the closure of Lindt’s city studio in 1895. Ever resourceful, he built a large guest-house, the Hermitage, at Blacks’ Spur near Narbethong, Victoria, where he continued to sell prints from his old glass negatives together with new photographs he took of the dense forest surrounding his new home, visitors in his gardens and genre scenes. In 1913 he and Caire prepared a tourist booklet on the area, encouraging visitors to sample both his hospitality and his pictures. Despite setbacks caused by anti-German feeling during the First World War, he continued an active social and professional life from the Hermitage and was an influence on the next generation of photographers, both through exchanging work with them and via the Australasian Photographic Review . He had a long and active involvement with the Royal Geographical Society, of which he was a British as well as a Victorian member, being appointed a councillor of the latter in 1893.
After the death of his first wife on 27 May 1888 as the result of bearing a still-born child, Lindt married his retoucher, Catherine Elizabeth (Kate) Cousens, on 10 July 1889. He died of heart failure on 26 February 1926 after violent bush-fires had been raging for several days around his beloved Hermitage. He was survived by Kate.
- Writers:
- Johanson, Graeme
Jones, Shar
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
