713
Beyers to prospect for gold. Fortune came in 1872 when
they found the largest gold nugget ever, weighing 286kg
in the remote New South Wales township of Hill End.
He wanted to promote Australia choosing photography
as one of the main means and he became the patron of
travelling photographers Henry Beaufoy Merlin and his
assistant Charles Bayliss, who had already photographed
many aspects of the Hill End area. They covered parts
of New South Wales before Merlin’s death in 1873,
with Holterman continuing to support Bayliss through
his travels that also took in Victoria. Holterman built a
grand home on Sydney’s North shore in 1874 with a
camera obscura in its roof and with Bayliss they took
massive panoramic exposures of Sydney on 22 in. ×
18 in. plates. In 1876 Holtermann travelled extensively
overseas taking Merlin and Bayliss’ photographs to the
Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia and thereafter to
Europe where he exhibited them at the Paris Exposition
Universalle Internationale de 1878. Returning to Sydney
in 1878, Holtermann displayed at the Sydney Interna-
tional Exhibition of 1879 and subsequently was elected
to the New South Wales Parliament in 1883, practising
photography as an amateur making panoramas and
stereoviews. He died 29 April 1885 at St. Leonards. A
collection of 3500 wet plate negatives he owned form
the Holtermann collection at the State Library of New
South Wales.
Marcel Safier
Holdings: State Library of New South Wales,
Sydney; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
HOOPER, COLONEL WILLOUGHBY
WALLACE (1837–1912)
English, active in India, photographer, military
offi cer
Hooper began his career at East India House in the Sec-
retary’s Department; then joined the 7th Madras Cavalry
in 1858 at which time he left for India where he would
serve for the next 40 years. As a young lieutenant, he be-
came known as an enthusiastic and competent amateur
photographer. This was a skill valued by Lord Canning,
then Governor-General of India (1856–58). Canning
had begun an informal collection of photographs docu-
menting the peoples, lands, trades, and monuments of
India to which he actively encouraged colonial offi cers
to contribute prints. In the aftermath of The Indian
Mutiny or Sepoy Rebellion, amassing information on
the complex societies of colonial India became a mat-
ter of military interest. Canning, now Viceroy of India,
directed the transformation of what had been a private
collection into an offi cial project of the
India Offi ce—a vast data base of visual information
and descriptive texts which would “fairly represent the
different varieties of the Indian Races.” The result was
The People of India: A Series of Photographic Illustra-
tions, with Descriptive Letterpress, of the Races and
Tribes of Hindustan (London, 1868–1875), a monumen-
tal, eight volume catalogue of ethnic, racial, and caste
types which included photographic portraits, physical
description, geographic location, and assessment of
moral character and political reliability of the subcon-
tinents subject population. The volumes were compiled
and published by J. Forbes Watson and John William
Kaye of the India Offi ce. Photographs were solicited
from amateur photographers in the colonial and military
service, as well as acquired from some commercial
photographers. It was for this project that Lt. Hooper in
1862 was released from military duties and transferred
to the 4th Cavalry, Saugor and Secunderabad, where he
devoted himself almost exclusively to acquiring portraits
of the peoples of the Central Provinces of India. His
portraits, a three-quarter view of a single person against
a plain cloth backdrop, are distinctive for the intensity
of his subjects’ expression and the immediacy of their
presence. The portraits stand as, perhaps, the best of his
photographic work.
No doubt encouraged by offi cial support for his pho-
tography, and as “The People of India” project neared
completion, he entered into a commercial venture with
photographer George Western to market photographs of
Anglo-Indian life under the fi rm Hooper and Western.
Despite the commercial success of a series of twelve,
staged photographs entitled “Tiger Shooting” (c. 1872),
Hooper elected to remain in military service and ad-
vanced in rank: Captain, 1870; Major, 1878; Lieutenant
Colonel, 1884; and Colonel in 1888.
Hooper photographed the human toll of the great
Madras Famine of 1876–78—emaciated victims neatly
organized by sex and age and collected like cordwood
in front of offi cial buildings. His photographs were
published in Britain and he was caricatured in Punch,
as reports circulated that he had offered no succor to
the starving subjects he had caused to be brought to the
settlement to be photographed. In 1885 he took part in
the Third Burmese war as Provost Marshall of the Burma
Expeditionary Force and made an extensive photograph-
ic record of the expedition. This was later published as
Burmah, A series of one hundred photographs illustrat-
ing incidents connected with the British Expeditionary
Force to that country from the embarkation at Madras,
1st November 1885, to the capture of King Theebaw,
with many views of the surrounding country, native life
and industries, and most interesting descriptive notes by
Lieut-Col W W Hooper (1887). Hooper’s photographic
activity during the Burmese campaign led to offi cial
censure. He was brought before a Court of Inquiry to
answer charges of extorting evidence and for cruel and
inhumane treatment of a group of Dacoit prisoners who