John Joseph Dwyer
Untitled (Horseshoe Battery 100 stamp Oct-903, GMM 31) 1903
courtesy the Western Australian Museum, GM01031

Sometime during October 1903 a tall, red headed photographer with an Anglo Celtic complexion not at all suited to the desert sun, set up his camera in the crushing mill of the Golden Horseshoe Gold Mine in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia. In the stilled quiet of this hot industrial shed John Joseph Dwyer photographed the mine’s battery.

Using the building and the battery head, Dwyer has composed a dense graphic image of architectural and mechanical elements. These are alternatively thin and robust, circular and rectangular, timber and steel, rough hewed and finely machined, all precisely arranged in the photographic frame. Two elaborate brass light fixtures hang in the space, incongruous in detail and intricacy. Light reflects off the dark water in box channels that run down the side of the shed. The repetition of these elements, their efficient industrial organisation and lack of scale are exploited by Dwyer’s camera and its capacity to reproduce a convincing representation of perspective. The exposure is quick. Light reflects crisply off the water, the surface of which is fixed in an instant, but the openings in the shed are overexposed. Blurred light eats into the image, revealing the strength of the light outside in contrast to the dark interior.

The graphic density of the photograph is further complicated by its surface texture and imperfections. These are, in part, due to the technical challenges and fragility of the dry plate process. They are also traces of an archival palimpsest that the image has accumulated. Textual evidence of this process is found on the image, scratched precisely into the dark, or overexposed in the blurred light at the edge of the timber walkway. These traces mark the photograph as a commercial product that then shifts from studio to public archive. The photographer’s notes are joined by a museum accession number and notations made by several hands on the emulsion side of the glass plate that are now seen in reverse. Cracks in the glass plate arc across the image, the corner is shattered, and the sharp line of these breaks captures light, casting crisp shadows.

The vanishing point in this photograph is not contained by the shed’s thin tin wall but projects out into a terrain that Dwyer also repeatedly re-imagined. This landscape was exploited for its picturesque rather than its formal potential. Despite the cliché of ‘the Golden Mile’, the richest mile of gold in the world was actually a landscape of waste, pictorialised by Dwyer into a terrain that, in its disordered state, marks the triumph of the industrial over the natural, where a low line of desert hills becomes a new topography of poppet heads, chimneys and slime dams. In this industrial picturesque, changes to the environment are documented by the camera; before and after photographs show the progress of mines and men pose before great tailing dumps or large artificial underground caverns.

The image that you are looking at on this web page arrives here through a convoluted pathway. What you are viewing is the web quality version of a high resolution scan of a photographic print. This print was scanned to produce large, exhibition quality images. Its negative has been lost or stolen. This negative was a contact negative made to preserve the images as the sulphuric air of Kalgoorlie dissolved the emulsion on Dwyer’s original glass plates. These recent transformations of the format of the image – from negative to negative to positive, glass plate to contact print to digital scan, from light held by silver salts to light captured by a sensor and converted into a binary code of zeros and ones – seem entirely appropriate when looking at the Dwyer ‘collection’. He regularly rephotographed the work of others, cropping out their signatures and imposing his own studio stamp or watermarks. His images have also been appropriated, reproduced repeatedly without credit. They often become the standard representation of aspects of life in Kalgoorlie, reappearing decades later in publications such as tourist brochures. He sold his studio, equipment and plates in 1917, which subsequently changed hands several times again before being institutionalised in the State Library of Western Australia and the Western Australian Museum. In Kalgoorlie, Dwyer’s photographs have become the anonymous historic background to contemporary life in a place that locates itself simultaneously in its ‘golden past’ as well as its slightly less heroic present. They hang alongside the grand staircases of nineteenth century hotels and on the walls of fast food joints.

These are reasons why one might risk returning to the potentially hazardous terrain of this archive. In this instance, it is to an image that teeters on the edge of abstraction, one that challenges its status as merely industrial documentation. The image is fixed in its precise perspectival order, fragile as physical object and fluid in its contexts. These processes and traces are marked on its surface, written in darkness.