Design and Art Australia Online

professional photographer, worked as a 'photographic artist’ in Collins Street, Melbourne, from 1856, with branch studios at Caulfield in 1866 and Richmond in 1868-69. He showed photographs at the Victorian exhibitions of 1856 and 1861 and was awarded a honourable mention for his portraits at the latter. In 1859 he advertised his studio at 4 Collins Street East as 'The Xylographic Portrait Gallery’, xylographs being photographs printed onto the wooden blocks from which engravers cut their images. This sort of experiment had been tried with daguerreotypes, but it was not until the negative collodion process was in common use that engravings from photographs proved practicable. Williams presumably employed the latter process, which became extremely popular. In June 1866 a fire at Williams’s Melbourne premises 'resulted in a loss of stock and apparatus valued at £1,500 and of over 5,000 negatives and specimen portraits’, but he re-established the business and continued in Collins Street until about 1872.

Writers:

Staff Writer

Date written:

1992

Last updated:

2011