Left: Foelsche’s 1888 portrait of a young Larrakia man known to the Europeans as Davey Guillemaine, aged 25. His chest is decorated with ceremonial designs, suggesting that a performance had been held shortly before. Davey was probably employed as a police-tracker by Foelsche.
Right: An unnamed Alligator Rivers man, aged 27, photographed by Paul Foelsche during the 1880s. He is wearing a woven headband, grass necklace and cane armlets.
Information of the identities of subjects supplied by Philip Jones.
Foelsche began his series of Aboriginal portraits in 1877, responding to requests from physical anthropologists investigating ‘types of mankind’. But he soon came to know the Aboriginal people of Darwin and Port Essington as individuals, rather than as racial specimens. He discarded the measuring scale, and his scientific studies became evocative portraits – and vital records of the ancestors of Aboriginal peoples of the Top End. This album contains more than 200 of Foelsche’s portraits of men, women, boys and girls from the principal language groups around Darwin.
Foelsche went to the trouble of recording the names, ages and language groups of his subjects. He provided them with patterned sarongs to wear for the photographs, which he developed using the laborious ‘wet plate’ process.
The subject needed to be still for several seconds, and Foelsche asked them to sit on a chair with their arms folded in their laps, so as to obscure the chairback.
