Nostalgias of Malta by Giovanni Bonello.
Images by SL Cassar from the 1890s to the 1930s.
Fondazzjoni Patrimonju Malti. 2008. pp 224
A lifetime ago, my father worked for Cassar tar-ritratti. Many people, especially old people, would have somewhere in their homes the highly stylized wedding photo of bride and groom, in their wedding suits, standing in front of an equally stylized backdrop and signed Gius Cassar at the bottom corner.
That was the Cassar tar-ritratti I and many my age remember in High Street Hamrun. It would be my father, from the war years to around 1966, who would be the one to develop and produce the photo. I still remember him colouring the black and white photos, giving them a semblance of colour photos before the introduction of real colour in photography.
Those were the years where the photographer’s tool was a huge, unwieldy, camera, set up on a tripod, while the photographer would cover his head with a blanket while he shoots the picture. Those were also the years when my father’s fingers were invariably brown with the developer, the hypo and the fixer. He used to develop the photos in small, dark and dingy rooms next to the studio.
That was the Cassar tar-ritratti I and my contemporaries remember, up from the church in Hamrun’s High Street. People used to go there from all over Malta, especially from the villages, and from Gozo. For them it was an experience, a novelty. And also a mark of respectability for all families who were respectable had to have a big photo of their wedding hung in the intrata, the first thing you notice when you enter people’s homes.
But that is not the Cassar, the Salvatore Lorenzo, who is the subject of this book. It seems uncanny, however, that there could be two Cassar families in the development of photography in Malta, who were, it seems, unconnected, without there being some sort of getting a piggy-back on the shoulders of the older Cassar and his name. Even the G Cassar embossed signature resembles the SL Cassar one.
Salvatore Lorenzo Cassar was born in December 1855 in Vittoriosa but moved to Tripoli where he learnt the photo-
graphic art.
On his return to Malta, Salvatore opened his first professional studio in No. 1, Strada Carri, Valletta, the malodorous lane by the side of the Auberge de Provence. Then he opened two further studios in Strada San Giovanni, opposite St John’s.
Salvatore must have been a man with an eye for technological developments. Even then, he was famous for having adopted “the most modern systems and processes” as well as for flashlight photography. By 1900, thanks to technological development, the camera had so evolved he could boast of taking “instantaneous” photos.
By 1927, his adverts state that he was the Malta agent for Kodak, the photography giant which has only recently been laid low by the development of digital cameras.
Giovanni Bonello’s book gives due prominence, considering Judge Bonello’s own collections and previous writings, to the postcards, etc. produced from Cassar’s photos. Originally, the postal regulations only allowed the address to be written on the back. It was not till 1906 that new regulations permitted a message to be added to the address.
Hence began, we might say, a rivalry with the two other big names of the early 20th century, Ellis and Critien, for the new market of views of Malta.
Ellis, of course, was we may say the Court photographer, in that he had clear and easy access to the British colonial masters, the armed forces and the Malta nobility, which gravitated around the British masters. But Cassar managed to get a toe in the door and we find him getting various commissions for group portraiture, sports events, and British army and navy clubs.
What emerges from his photos is a glimpse of Malta in the early decades of the last century. A visual record of the island, a country, a people, from the pre-war Valletta, its City Gate and its Opera House to his portraits of ordinary people, to chronicles of events like State visits and religious ceremonies to national events (1921 Constitution) to sports events.
Noel Grima