286
Trinidad
The French photographer Félix Morin worked in Port
Spain during the 1870s.
The “Eureka Art Studio,” of J.E. Marshall, at 20
Frederick Street, was active near the end of the 19th
century, making portraits and recording popular types
and public markets. Later, at the beginning of the 20th
century he merged with the new enterprise “Muir,
Marshall & Co.” This studio produced albums with
photomechanical reproductions that were intended as
souvenirs from the island.
Conclusions
It is evident that most of the early activity in the region
was made by travellers or foreign photographers. Many
of them settled down in the different cities, building
stronger traditions in each place.
The discovery of exotic places via adventurers was
a primum mobile, that slowly was replaced by a second
wave of photographers who pursued the search for a place
that World foster a successful comercial business.
Portraits, as usual, were the main production of these
artists, mainly in carte-de-visite and portrait-cabinet
formats. Likewise, extant views were mostly in stereo-
scopic format.
Abel Alexander and Roberto A. Ferrari
See Also: Muybridge, Eadweard James (Edward
Muggeridge); Kilburn, Benjamin West and Edgard;
and Daguerre, Louis-Jacques-Mandé.
Further Reading
Anonomous, Soublette et Fils: Photography in Curaçao around
1900. Citco Group Ltd., 1999.
Besson, Gerard, A photograph album of Trinidad at the turn of
the 19th century. Newtown: Port of Spain, ca. 1985.
Bradford Burns, E., Eadweard Muybridge in Guatemala, 1875:
The Photographer as Social Recorder. Univ. of California
Press, 1986.
Del Cid F., Enrique, First Photographers who worked in Guate-
mala. In: The Daguerreian Annual (USA), 1994.
Facio, Sara, Juan José de Jesús Yas, José Domingo Noriega,
María Cristina Orive—100 años de fotografía de Guatemala.
(Catalog) Buenos Aires: Fotogalería Teatro Municipal Gral.
San Martín, 1988.
García, Wilfredo, Fotografía, un arte para nuestro siglo. Repúbli-
ca Dominicana: Maperisa, 1981.
Gesualdo, Vicente, Historia de la Fotografía en América - Desde
Alaska hasta Tierra del Fuego en el siglo XIX. Buenos Aires:
Editorial Sui Generis, 1990.
Gómez, Máximo, Mi escolta y otros escritos. La Habana: Edito-
rial de Ciencias Sociales, 1986.
Groeneveld, A, Wachlin, S. et al., Photography in Suriname
1839–1939/Fotografi e in Suriname 1839–1939. Rotterdam,
1990.
Haya, Maria Eugenia, La fotografía Cubana en el Siglo XIX.
Habana: Dirección de Artes Plásticas y Diseño, 1982.
Hoffenberg, Hack, Nineteenth-Century South America in Photo-
graphs. Dover: New York, 1982.
——. America ́s Forgotten Photographer. New York: Doubleday
& Co., 1966.
Levine, Robert M., Cuba in the 1850’s Through the Lens of
Charles DeForest Fredricks. Tampa: University of South
Florida Press, 1990.
Maas, Ellen, Foto Album—Sus años dorados: 1858–1920 Bar-
celona: Editorial Gustavo Gili, 1982.
Monsanto, Christel, Personal communication. Curaçao, 2002.
Rufi no del Valle, Jorge Oller y Ramón Cabrales, Primer daguerro-
tipo cubano. In: Cuba-Foto, (electronic journal) (La Habana),
September 1 to 15, 2001.
Von Dewitz, Bodo & Matz, Reinhard, Silber und Saltz—Zur Früh-
zeit der Photographie im deutschen Sprachraum 1839–1860.
Köln und Heidelberg: Edition Braus, 1989.
V.V.A.A., Fotografía Latinoamericana—Colección CEDODAL.
Buenos Aires: CEDODAL, 2001.
——. Iconografía—Máximo Gómez. La Habana: Editorial de
Ciencias Sociales, 1986.
——. Nostalgia del paraíso—Un crucero fotográfi co por el
Caribe decimonónico—Fotografía caribeña del siglo XIX.
(Photographic almanac) Caracas: Biblioteca Nacional,
1993.CEYLON (SRI LANKA)
Evidence of photographic activity in Sri Lanka during
the fi rst decade of photography is sparse, and it is now
unlikely that we will learn when the fi rst photographs
were taken on the island. It is known, however, that one
S. J. (or possibly S. F.) Barrow, whom the commercial
directories place in the island from 1844–49, was active
as a daguerreotypist for a period in the mid-1840s. While
no examples of his work are known to have survived
(perhaps unsurprising in view of the context in which
his name appears), an 1850 advertisement placed by
John Vanderstraaten in the periodical Young Ceylon,
claimed to be able to restore the now ‘defaced and ob-
scure’ daguerreotypes that Barrow had taken (at a cost
of between £4 and £10 each) in studios in Colombo and
Kandy in around 1844. The high cost of these portraits
and their evidently inferior quality, may go some way
to explaining the lack of enthusiasm for photography
which seems to have characterised these years.
The earliest extant photographs from Sri Lanka are
now almost certainly those taken by Frederick Fiebig, a
German lithographer turned calotypist based in Calcutta
from the mid-1840s. Fiebig appears to have visited the
island during a trip to South India in 1852 and some
70 hand-coloured salted paper prints of the island were
purchased by the East India Company in 1856. These
indicate that he photographed only in Galle (then the
island’s principal port), Colombo and Kandy, taking
architectural views, landscapes, coffee estate studies
and portraits of representative ‘native types,’ a choice of
material which was to become a staple for succeeding
generations of commercial photographers on the island.