The research we have provided on these weblogs since 2003 about the police work of professional photographer Thomas J. Nevin in Tasmania during the 1870s and the mugshots he produced has stimulated and inspired a global reading public. If you … Continue reading
Category Archives: The Port Arthur Convicts Commission
Thomas FRANCIS was photographed by T.J. NEVIN on 6th February 1874
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Thomas FRANCIS was discharged from Port Arthur, per the first notice (below) in the police gazette dated 31st January – 4th February, 1874. Note that no physical details of the prisoner had been recorded by the police up to that … Continue reading
Tasmanian crime statistics 1866-1875
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How many people in Tasmania over the decade 1866 to 1875 were convicted of a crime, and how many were photographed? These tables from the Journals of the House of Assembly 1875-6 gives the statistics for the Decennial Returns of … Continue reading
Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery holdings
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This Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery notice about their photographic collections appeared in November 2006. It is now September 2010, and the promised website with viewable databases of their vast photographic holdings is still not up and running. The TMAG … Continue reading
From Thomas Bock to Thomas Nevin: Supreme Court prisoner portraits
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“… portraits of prisoners taken in the dock …” THOMAS BOCK Police artists worked in the Supreme Court of Tasmania from as early as 1824. An album of portraits of “prisoners taken in the dock” (Dunbar, QVMAG catalogue 1991:25) by … Continue reading
The Supreme Court mugshots taken by T.J. Nevin from 1871 onwards
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THE PHOTOGRAPHER Professional and commercial photographer Thomas J. Nevin undertook the job of systematically photographing prisoners who were tried at the Supreme Court, Hobart from mid 1871 at the behest of the Tasmanian government. His job description was to photograph … Continue reading
A first-class faithful Likeness February 1873
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Hard times 1872 Thomas Nevin’s commercial studio stamp ca. 1871 Images courtesy Marcel Safier © 2006. Small businesses in Tasmania were affected by an economic downturn in 1872, precipitated by excessive costs involved in railway construction, a decline in population, … Continue reading
Convict Wm Meaghers, original by Nevin 1874-75
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Very few of these lantern slide reproductions and paper reprints by Beattie and Searle from Nevin’s original negative images of 1870s convicts have survived. This item, of prisoner William Meaghers (1874), is held in the NLA collections with the prisoner’s … Continue reading
Poster boys 1870s
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Who were they? They were T.J. Nevin’s sitters for police records, mostly “Supreme Court men” photographed on committal for trial at the Supreme Court adjoining the Hobart Gaol when they were isolated in silence for a month after sentencing. If … Continue reading
19th century prison photography: Tasmania 1872
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When Thomas Nevin sat down to read The Mercury on the morning of 24th October 1872 and turned to an article reprinted from the London papers on “the valuable working of the Prevention of Crimes Act, or as it is … Continue reading
T.J. Nevin’s prisoner mugshots, Mitchell Library NSW
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THOMAS NEVIN’S ELEVEN The Mitchell Library at the State Library of NSW has catalogued eleven prisoner photographs so far which were taken by Thomas Nevin and his younger brother Jack Nevin at the Hobart Gaol between 1875 and 1884. All … Continue reading
Nevin’s mugshots: the transitional pose and frame
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In the first of his two three-year contracts to the Prisons Department of the Tasmanian Colonial Government and the Hobart Town Hall Municipal Police Office (1873-1880), commercial photographer and civil servant Thomas J. Nevin deployed the conventional techniques of 19th … Continue reading
Nevin’s photos of prisoners Sutherland and Stock with death warrant
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From the David Scott Mitchell Collection, 1907 … Photography © KLW NFC 2009 ARR. Above: Detail of Nevin’s carte of condemned prisoner James Sutherland with the blue hand-tinted scarf intended to reflect reality, one of several extant hand-tinted prisoner mugshots … Continue reading
Margaret Glover and the fabrication of photohistory
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The true origins of the photographic misattribution to non-photographer and Port Arthur official A.H. Boyd of Thomas J. Nevin’s police mugshots of Tasmanian prisoners 1870s-1880s lies with a reference to the art historian Margaret Glover’s article “Some Port Arthur Experiments” … Continue reading
The QVMAG convict photos exhibition 1977
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These are some of the original documents and press release prepared for the 1977 exhibition of T. J. Nevin’s prisoner mugshots at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania, catalogued as “Convict portraits, Port Arthur 1874″ in public … Continue reading