John Shewan

Background

The Historic Photograph collection has several hundred glass plate negatives, lantern slides, and paper prints attributed to the John Shewan collection. John Shewan, a keen amateur photographer, continued to use his own formula for developing his photographs as salt paper prints well into the early 1900's and a copy of this formula along with some of his private papers and drawings are kept in the Historic Photograph collection.

John Shewan worked in the Department of Physiology at the Sydney University as factotum for Professor Anderson Stuart from 1883-1911. There he prepared apparatus, kept lecture notes drew specimens and took photographs of the University's building activities.

Aside from numerous pictures of the development of the University of Sydney John Shewan also experimented with photomicrography during the 1880's and collected photographs on ethnographic subjects after his appointment as Acting Curator at the Macleay Museum in 1912.