Photo Essay
Even young trees bear the signature of deep time, if not eternity. For most of humanity’s existence, men and women have looked upwards through trees, wondering at the tracery of their branches piercing the firmament, the domed lid of the earthly world. Recorded mythology confirms that trees have occupied that special place in every ancient belief system; rooted in ...
In 1890, at the age of forty-four, William Henry Corkhill of Tilba Tilba – accountant, cheesemaker and farm manager – decided to become a photographer. There is no record of his ever receiving any training in photography, but he had, it seems, read a few books on the subject. Over the next twenty years, he would take thousands of pictures of his family, friends and neighbours, seldom venturing beyond the confines of his local community with his camera.
In 1975 Corkhill’s daughter offered the National Library his collection of glass plate negatives, which had dwindled over the intervening decades to about 1000 in number. Suffering the decays of time and damp, only 840 of the plates still retained printable images, but the record they contain of life in a small but thriving rural community at the turn of the twentieth century is fascinating. As we see Tilba Tilba through Corkhill’s eyes, he, too, as the creator of this singularly focused, longitudinal record, becomes fascinating.
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