Summary

Portrait of a young Anmatyerr man wearing a head band and a neck ornament. Frank Gillen has identified the man Atwain-tika (F. Gillen, p.165, plate No.44). At Barrow Creek, about 280 km north of Alice Springs, Spencer encountered members of two groups, the Anmatyerr and the Kaytetye, both similar in appearance and social organisation to the Arrernte, but smaller in numbers. Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen met at the end of the Horn Expedition at Alice Springs in July of 1894. This meeting and subsequent friendship resulted in a number of collaborative field expeditions and publications. In 1901 Spencer and Gillen set out on what would be their greatest collaboration and final expedition together, to study the Arrernte people and other groups between the Arrernte and the north coast. Spencer and Gillen were intent upon obtaining the most detailed as possible records of the societies they studied, and to achieve this, they used the most advanced technology available to them. The two men became pioneers not only of photography but also of sound and film recording. Their diaries make numerous references to the use of this equipment and the challenges they met in obtaining good results. The cameras that they used had developed sufficiently to record action sequences as they occurred. Spencer's desire was to take photographs of people engaged in the activities of daily life, while remaining as unconscious as possible about the presence of the camera.

Physical Description

Silver gelatin emulsion. Half plate.

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