professional photographer, was a German who arrived at Sydney with his wife, Thekla, in the Balmoral on 3 February 1850. He opened a studio at 15 Hunter Street in March, where he advertised calotype (salted paper) portraits and views. On 16 March 1854 the Sydney Morning Herald noted that he was the only commercial practitioner of this process in Sydney (although misspelling his name as Helyer). Although his camera was equipped with a fast Voigtlander lens exposures lasted half a minute and sitters had to be clamped in position.

Hetzer seems always to have specialised in paper photographs. Some of his calotype portraits survive in private collections but most known images are later wet-plate collodion negative albumen prints of Sydney streets and buildings, in particular a series of thirty-six stereo views of the city which he published by subscription in 1858. By May 1859 the set had grown to sixty, detailed in the Sydney Morning Herald of 13 May 1859, including 'a succession of views forming two or three complete panoramas, with many detached pictures of nooks and corners of bush and rock scenery’. One set was apparently owned by the architect Edmund Thomas Blacket; prints of several architectural subjects shown at the Josef Lebovic Gallery in 1989 carried Blacket’s initials verso. Hetzer also produced large, 10 × 12 inch (25.4 × 30.4 cm) albumen prints.

At the 1861 Sydney exhibition in preparation for the 1862 London International Exhibition, Hetzer was awarded an honourable mention for his photographic studies of trees. Also sent on to London was his coloured composite photograph, 46 × 24 inches (116.8 × 60.9 cm), of the twenty-three officers of the Sydney Provincial Grand Lodge of Freemasons. He showed two groups of photographs at the 1867 Paris Universal Exhibition, having been specifically engaged by the New South Wales commissioners to depict the monuments of the growing colony, including the Botanic Gardens, Victoria Gate, Albert Fountain, Australian Museum and Sydney University. Other photographs were of the Newcastle wharves, the Singleton and Picton railway bridges and the Menangle railway viaduct.

Hetzer was rapidly absorbed into the artistic life of Sydney. Only a few months after his arrival he was admitted to the Australian Artists Society (a mutual benefit organisation) together with Mrs Steadman Christie and W. Griffin . He participated in the first photographic conversazione of the Philosophical Society of New South Wales in 1858, displaying his work alongside photographs by the Sydney amateurs John Smith , Robert Hunt , William Stanley Jevons and Edward Ward and with fellow Sydney professionals Edwin Dalton and the Freeman brothers . He possibly printed negatives for some of the amateur photographers and sold them chemicals and equipment. His stereo portrait of the early amateur calotypists Joseph and Ernest Docker dates from about 1861. Photographs by Hetzer are included in the Camden Park albums thought to have been assembled by Sir William Macarthur , eg. portraits of Lieutenant Arthur Onslow and his fiancée, Elizabeth Macarthur . Hetzer’s photograph of a group of Aborigines of the Burragorang tribe near Camden (Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW) was probably taken on the Macarthur estate.

Notices announcing the auction of Hetzer’s studio at 287 George Street and his photographic equipment (including 3500 registered negatives) appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald on 14 and 30 March 1867, when it was reported that the Hetzers were about to leave for England in the Sobraon . Both premises and negatives were purchased by Joseph Degotardi .

Writers:

Kerr, Joan
Davies, Alan

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011