Corset Rock

H. H. Tilbrook
Australia
1848 – 1937

Corset Rock
1898
gelatin-silver photograph
Place made
Bungaloo Bay, South Australia
Medium
gelatin-silver photograph
Dimensions
37.9 x 28.0 cm (image)
40.3 x 28.2 cm (sheet)
45.0 x 32.5 cm (cardboard)
Credit line
R.J. Noye Collection. Gift of Douglas and Barbara Mullins 2004
Accession number
20041RJN12
Signature and date
Not signed. Not dated.
Media category
Photograph
Collection area
Australian photographs

  • WALL LABEL: Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography, 2016

     

     

    Self-portraits taken in the landscape are rarely found among nineteenth-century photographs, due to the technical difficulties involved. One photographer who successfully overcame the challenge was Henry Tilbrook, who invented a unique long-distance shutter-release mechanism, which involved a long thread and an empty bullet cartridge to activate the shutter. 

     

    Tilbrook was particularly fascinated with geological formations and on a trip to Cape Banks, on the coast near Mount Gambier, Tilbrook encountered ’Corset Rock’, named after the ’wasp waist’ of nineteenth-century corsetry.

     

    In his diary Tilbrook wrote of his difficulty in taking this photograph:

    I fixed the camera in about two feet deep of seawater and, having adjusted everything, flung the reel of thread on top of the rock and climbed up myself. I had not boots on, of course, being in the sea. But when I got to the top, I found the rocky spikes so sharp that I could not move. Accordingly I had to descend and put my boots on. Then I climbed up again, wound up the thread and took the view.

     

    Julie Robinson, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs

     

     

     

  • The photography of H.H. Tilbrook - South Australia at the turn of the century

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 20 July 2001 – 4 November 2001

  • Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 5 February 2016 – 18 September 2016

  • A Century in Focus: South Australian photography 1840s-1940s

    Art Gallery of South Australia, 9 November 2007 – 28 January 2008
  • [Catalogue] Bunbury, Alisa. 2001. The photography of H H Tilbrook. Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia.
  • [Catalogue] Zagala, Maria, Jane Messenger, Ken Orchard, Philip Jones, Carolyn Lovitt, and Elspeth Pitt. 2007. A Century in Focus - South Australian Photography 1840s - 1940s. Adelaide: Art Gallery of South Australia.
  • [Book] Bonney, Neville. The Rocks Les Charpentiers.
  • [Book] Walkley, Jane, Grant, Trevor. Excerpts from the Diaries of H.H. Tilbrook.