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WALKER, WILLIAM HALL
from Walker from January 1893. Eastman soon forced
Walker from the company completely.
Walker, a wealthy man from his Kodak stock, died
in November 1917.
Michael Pritchard
WALL, ALFRED HENRY (d. 1906 )
According to his obituary, Alfred Henry Wall was
born in London, date unknown, and had a childhood
suffi ciently unhappy that he ran away from home and
went to work for a time for one of the earliest da-
guerreotype studios in the city before joining a theatre
company—an activity he would return to for a period
in the 1860s.
He opened his own studio in Cheapside c.1850, and
another in the Strand (date unknown), but by 1851
was working as a photographic assistant at the Great
Exhibition.
Photographic News reported in 1861 that he was
working as an itinerant portrait painter under the name
of R. A. Seymour, and coincidentally in that year he
published A Manual of Artistic Colouring as Applied to
Photographs. By 1862 he had returned to commercial
photography and opened a studio in London’s West-
bourne Grove.
In 1864 and 1865 he published two annual volumes
entitled The Art Student which discussed photography
as an art form, a subject aired several times since 1859.
From 1868 until 1870 he edited The Illustrated Photog-
rapher, which described itself as ‘a weekly journal of
science and art,’ and his contributions to several con-
temporary journals did much to expand understanding
of the photographic processes.
Wall’s last photographic book Artistic Landscape
Photography was published in 1896.
John Hannavy
WALL, EDWARD JOHN
(1860–1928)
Edward John Wall was one of the leading writers on
the theory and practice of photography in the closing
decades of the nineteenth century. His 1889 Dictionary
of Photography became a standard reference work and
ran to many editions worldwide. Although not published
until 1925, his History of Three-Colour Photography
was the fi rst refl ective look at that subject, drawing on
material he had fi rst published in the British Journal of
Photography in the early 1900s.
In the closing years of the 19th century he contributed
a manual on carbon printing to Amateur Photographer
magazine’s One Shilling Library series of books, but
one of his most signifi cant contributions to the practice
of photography was his published 1907 suggestion for
the technique which became known as bromoil print-
ing. Wall himself did not fully articulate the mechanics
of the process, but his initial suggestions as to how
it might work were realised in a practical sense by C
Welbourne Piper, who published a working process
later that same year.
Trained as a chemist, Wall initially worked for the
plate manufacturers B. J. Edwards & Co. in London,
before embarking on a career which embraced camera
manufacture in the United States with the Blair Cam-
era Company, journalism, photography, and motion
pictures.
John HannavyWALTER, CHARLES (CARL)
(c. 1831–1907)
Botanist, photographer, journalist
Born in Germany, he emigrated from Mecklenberg,
Tokheim, to Victoria, Australia, in c.1856 where
he worked as a botanical collector for the Victorian
Government Botanist, Baron von Mueller. In 1858,
he worled as a photographer and botanical collector,
accompanied R.L.J. Ellery’s geodetic survey party into
eastern Gippsland.
In 1865, he advertised himself as a “Country Photo-
graphic Artist” of 45, Bell Street, Fitzroy, Melbourne,
and began supplying photographs and reports of his
travels in the bush to The Illustrated Australian News.
Much of his early work was concerned with recording
portraits of aborigines and he documented the mission
stations of Ramahyuck (Lake Wellington), Coranderrk
(Yarra Flats) and Lake Tyers. In 1867, he sent portraits
of Natives of Victoria to the Anthropological Society
of London.
Walter was, perhaps, Australia’s fi rst photojournalist,
for as early as 1865 he sent a report of the “Salmon Tanks
in Badger Creek” to the Illustrated Australian News. In
the following year, he describes a trip overland to “Falls
on the Niagara Creek, Mount Torbreck” with his “ap-
paratus and tent upon his back—the whole weighing
about fi fty pounds.”
Walter used a stereoscopic camera for most of his
work but also produced some half-plate and whole-
plate negatives. He registered photographs with the
Victorian Copyright Offi ce in 1870 and in 1871 he
advertised “A very large stock of Stereoscopic Views of
Aboriginal Life, Mining, Scenery and other Australian
Subjects.” The earliest extant photograph by Walter is
dated 1862; his work continued to be published until
the early 1870s.
Bill Gaskins