Project: Kittles Tronerud & King Island
Published on August 30th, 2010
I’m in the process of lodging my application to do a Master of Fine Art and Design (MFAD) with a specialisation in photography for 2011. The focus of the MFAD is a solo exhibition of project work and I thought it might be fun to share my project pitch with the wider world.
My grandfather, Kittles Johannes Tronerud, was born in 1870 in Norway – the son of Jorgen Tronerud, school teacher and church singer, and Karen Mathea Tronerud. In 1889 Kittles jumped ship while in port in Melbourne and made his way to Tasmania where he married and raised his first family of five children on the North Coast before being widowed. His naturalisation papers note his profession as Photographer.
Kittles raised his second family of around 10 children – fathering my mother and Aunt Rita in his early 70s to a much younger wife – on King Island where he had much earlier shot extensive photography between 1900 and 1911.
Two attached PDFs [number 1 and number 2] outline Kittle’s family tree from the early 1800s… one brother emigrated to New York.
Mrs Dorothy Crow of Grassy, King Island wrote a letter (attached) to my sister in 1988 describing how her husband had come by Kittles (also known as Joe Tronerud) original camera and glass negatives from a local farmer. Her husband printed 100 of the negatives and they were exhibited on King Island then were exhibited for a further two weeks in the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston. Kittles camera and photographs are now housed in the King Island Museum.
A scan of a 1988 clipping from the King Island newspaper (also attached) shows four of the reproduced glass negatives.
The questions that I would like to address in the coursework relate to the way Kittles, an impoverished professional Photographer with dirt floors and a large family to feed, saw the world around him. I would like to revisit some of his key photographs and investigate the difference or sameness in culture and landscape on King Island exactly one century since some of these shots were taken. This would involve visiting King Island Museum and hunting down familial links in the local community. I shoot with a Nikon D90 DSLR and feel it would be interesting to compare the quality and attributes of those images, historical to contemporary, analogue to digital.
My photography portfolio work is available online at Steven Clark Studio.
