Artists alter historic Brisbane photos to ‘unpick the bias’ of the past

In January of 1911, the Elliott family of Stanley Terrace, Taringa, gathered to celebrate the ninth birthday of Alfred Henrie Elliott’s daughter Dorothy.

The children and their friends sat on the grass with their mother, Elizabeth, for Alfred’s tailboard camera.

Even though it’s Dorothy’s day, the centre of the resulting photograph is occupied by Alfred’s son, Alfred jnr, happily cradling a toy boat. Dorothy herself is seen sitting sulkily at the edge of the group.

Artist Joachim Froese found himself drawn to this group portrait and what it says about gender politics of the time. His 2024 re-imagining isolates each family member onto separate smartphones and tablets.

“But he’s rearranged the order,” explains Museum of Brisbane curator Elena Dias-Jayasinha. “So now Dorothy is in the centre, and she’s holding the toy boat, and her brother is holding the doll.”

Instead of a frown, Dorothy now sports a wide smile. “Disrupting the hierarchy. That’s what his work is all about.”

The Elliott Collection, one of the best records of Brisbane from 1890 to 1940, has been the subject of previous Museum of Brisbane exhibitions, most recently The View from Here in 2015. The collection was famously unearthed in 1983 in cedar cigar boxes found under a house in Red Hill.

Born in Devon, in England, Elliott immigrated to Brisbane with his family at the age of five in 1876 and spent most of his life as a banker. “Which makes sense,” says Dias-Jayasinha, “because at the time, photography was not an inexpensive hobby.”

Elliott began his hobby in the 1890s.

“He had a lot of different interests, from civic structures to parades and processions, but also recreational activities and sporting events.

“What really interests me is the story it tells of Brisbane at this time when the population was expanding and there was this huge push outwards into the suburbs.”

Landmarks such as the Treasury Building, the Walter Taylor Bridge and Old Government House pop up in the works, as well as familiar leisure locations such as New Farm Park, Bribie Island and Victoria Point.

As depicted in Elliott’s work, the Brisbane of 100-plus years ago was patriarchal, royalist and white. For the exhibition New Light: Photography Now + Then, Dias-Jayasinha commissioned seven contemporary Brisbane artists to “unpick the nuance and bias” of the Elliott Collection.

Artist Marian Drew has taken four of Elliott’s photographs, deleted their skies and bodies of water, and printed them on large mirrors. “Viewers become a part of the images, and they take on new life,” Dias-Jayasinha says.

First Nations artist Jo-Anne Driessens homed in on the bunya trees in Elliott’s work. Tammy Law placed images from the collection alongside historical photographs that relate to Queensland’s early Chinese migrant community.

Keemon Williams turns Elliott’s image of Point Danger in Tweed Heads and into a futuristic landscape, while Carl Warner analysed the compositional tropes of the work and used it to take his own uncannily Elliott-esque photograph of a scene in Mount Coot-tha.

Nina White, meanwhile, zooms in on neglected details of the photos, such as hands, to reveal the often obscured humanity of the subjects.

“The photographs are kind of formal,” White says. “I wanted to break that and get back to the relationships and tenderness. The archive is historically significant, but there’s a lot of ordinariness in it that is really lovely.”

Accompanying New Light is an exhibition of new black-and-white photographs of Brisbane shot in the style of Elliott, called Viewfinders. Sixty-eight images were selected from an open callout of local photographers.

“This really builds on the museum’s commitment to being a place for everyone and creating opportunities for community members to see their perspectives reflected,” Museum of Brisbane director Zoe Graham says.

As for Elliott’s original work, its history before the 1980s remains enigmatic even though the house he occupied in Stanley Terrace, “Tibrogargan”, is still standing. His glass plate negatives and camera came to the museum via a commercial gallery that no longer exists and were donated anonymously.

Dias-Jayasinha says her efforts to fill in the blanks were unsuccessful.

“I thought I had a few leads but none of them came to fruition.

“What’s been really exciting is commissioning artists to lean into the mystery and the unknowns of this collection.”

New Light: Photography Now + Then runs until July 13, 2025, at the Museum of Brisbane, Level 3, City Hall. Admission is free.