professional photographer and civil servant, was born near Belfast, Ireland. From 1867 until the end of 1875 he worked alone as a commercial photographer from Alfred Bock's former studio at 140 Elizabeth Street, Hobart, except for a period in the early 1870s when the firm became Nevin & Smith. (Smith has not been identified.) The bulk of the practice was the normal one of taking views, mainly of and around Hobart, like the stereo photo New Town from the Public School (Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery), and carte de visite portraits which were apparently of lower middle-class sitters to judge from the collection of standard portrait photographs and hand-coloured cartes-de-visite in the Archives Office of Tasmania. Larger commissions included photographing the full range of coaches used by Samuel Page’s firm in the early 1870s.
Seventy cdv identification photographs of Port Arthur convicts taken in about 1874 (Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery), two years before the settlement was closed, have been attributed to Nevin because several of them carry his studio stamp. Long, however, believes he was merely the printer or copyist of these and claims that the Port Arthur commandant A.H. Boyd was the sole Port Arthur convict photographer. Professional photographers, however, were employed to take identification photographs in mainland Australian prisons from the beginning of the 1870s (see Charles Nettleton) and these Port Arthur portraits fit the genre. Moreover, the darkroom Boyd authorised in the Port Arthur garden was not necessarily for his own use; no photographs taken by him have been identified.
Nevin’s photographic career ended abruptly at the end of 1875 and on 8 January 1876 the studio was advertised for lease. 'Mr Thomas Nevin, photographer’, had been appointed over twenty-three other applicants to the office of keeper at the Hobart Town Hall following the death of the former keeper Mr Needham. Despite a tendency to drink on duty, he remained in the position until 3 December 1880, when he was dismissed for being drunk the previous evening. The more serious charge for which he had been arrested, that he was associated with (or was) a figure in phosphorescent clothing who had been terrorising local residents by appearing late at night as a ghost, was dismissed for lack of evidence.
- Writers:
- Staff Writer
- Date written:
- 1992
- Last updated:
- 2011
