Historical information

An account of the life of John Willliam Lindt extracted from the book The Story of the Camera in Australia.

Significance

An account of the life of John Willliam Lindt extracted from the book The Story of the Camera in Australia.
John William Lindt (1845–1926), was a German-born Australian landscape and ethnographic photographer, early photojournalist, and portraitist.
John Lindt was responsible for a folio of photographs of the Fernshaw and Watts River area and he sold over 25,000 images of the Black Spur from his original negatives. In 1895 he was able to purchase land on the North East side of the Black Spur and subsequently built his home and guesthouse "The Hermitage" from where he continued his photographic career. In 1913 he collaborated with Nicholas Caire to produce a tourist booklet on the area. In 1925 the Argus reported that Lindt "continues to produce remarkable and most artistic pictures of the beauties of mountain landscape. He is not a believer in the blurred effects favoured by many ... instead he is a master of detail." Aged 81 Lindt died of heart failure during disastrous bushfires on 19 February 1926 at the Hermitage. He was survived by his wife Catherine who continued to run ‘The Hermitage’ guest house before she retired to the city.
John (Jack) Cato was a keen photographer from an early age and was the author of The Story of the Camera in Australia which when it was first published in 1955, was the first history of Australian photography and photographs.