Postmaster in Samoa for most of the German Administration period ). Mr Tattersall has chosen to place his posers on a slope opposite his own elevated camera position and then captured them and their environment with sharp detail and
Peter Rasmussen , who stored the Tattersall glass plates before they were irreparably damaged in a cyclone in 1966 .
Spemann Family Collection ( copped )
wonderful portrayal of texture . It is surely one of the most charming group photos to come out of the Samoan colonial period . ( A number of people are readily identifiable in the image which shows an eclectic mix of people of Samoan , German and
English descent ).
Mr Tattersall ’ s studio studies were , perhaps , less striking . The lighting was often rather flat and the clarity wanting , perhaps because of inferior lenses . For this reason , many Apia settlers preferred to visit Auckland photographer Herman J . Schmidt , whose moody , evocative and sharply detailed studies showed a shrewd understanding of side illumination and oblique poses . The Schmidt collection , at Auckland Libraries , has numerous images of Samoan settler families who made appointments during visits to Auckland .
Older residents of Samoa still remember Mr Tattersall working industriously into his old age with his head , shoulders and camera-back shrouded under a dark blanket as his subjects took up their pose in the studio and he studied the focussing plate on the back of his large format camera ( darkness was required to block out surrounding light for a clear view ). It is not clear that Mr Tattersall ever worked much with film . He may have continued to use glass plate negatives until the end of his career .
Alfred Tattersall was the man on the spot and Samoa was fortunate to have him . His huge and versatile body of work lives on to bring our understanding of the Samoan colonial period vividly to life . The wide distribution of his images and the advent of high-resolution scanning means
that much of his wonderful legacy has been secured for future generations . Digitisation has come to the rescue and filled the gap left by the accidental destruction of the Tattersall glass plate negatives in the tropical cyclone which struck Samoa in January 1966 .
Bert Tattersall and his wife Therese ( at front ) photographed in a group in Apia in the mid-late 1920 ’ s . Bert served in the Coldstream Guards in the First World War and was badly wounded . Spemann Family Collection ( cropped )
The facts surrounding this incident have been pieced together from a number of informants – John Dearing , Florence Rasmussen Funck and Hans Joachim ‘ Joe ’ Keil . When the Retzlaff family bought Tattersall ’ s old studio on Beach Rd in 1952
| To Walk Under Palm Trees - The Germans in Samoa : Snapshots from Albums | Tony Brunt
240