Taking up work as an itinerant piano-tuner, he traveled amongst towns in Victoria and New South Wales before settling in Grafton in 1863 where he became assistant and apprentice to photographer Conrad Wagner (c.1818- 1910).

[8] Over c.1873-1874, using the slow and laborious wet-plate collodion process Lindt produced photographs of the local indigenous people both in their environment conducting actual traditional ceremonies in the Clarence River district,[9][10] and in his studio.

[11] In the latter, the subjects, set in elaborate recreations of natural environment, clothed traditionally, and surrounded by implements, are the more compositionally controlled because Lindt was able to prepare and process his plates with the necessary complex chemistry close at hand in his darkrooms.

"[13] The Sydney Morning Herald, of 24 November 1874 expanded on what made the photographs attractive to Europeans; There is no settled portion of our colony which affords a better field for the study of aboriginal bush life than that presented by our northern rivers, for there - although decreasing yearly in numbers as their territories become more settled upon by white population - the blacks preserve their customs and traditions, adhering more closely to true aboriginal life than tribes in other districts of New South Wales, and Mr Lindt can be complimented upon the artistic use he has made of the rugged subjects he has had at his disposal.

Arriving after the event, Lindt produced a wet plate image Body of Joe Byrne, member of the Kelly gang, hung up for photography, outside the Benalla lock-up.

[34] A keen ethnographer of the nineteenth-century persuasion, in 1885 Lindt joined Major-General Sir Peter Scratchley, superintendent of coastal defences, in an expedition from Sydney on the Governor Blackall to the newly proclaimed Protectorate of British New Guinea.

As its official photographer, his first journey was up the Laloki River as far as the Rano Falls to the native villages at Sadara and Makara, then he made pictures of a lakatois on Port Moresby harbour, before venturing into the Owen Stanley Range, at night processing his plates by the light of a hurricane lamp wrapped in red trade cloth.

Lindt produced several hundred dry plate negatives of tribal life, and the resultant album was shown at the Indian and Colonial Exhibition in London in 1886.

[40] In 1889 Lindt moved his studio to 177 Collins Street and on 10 July 1889 he married his retoucher Catherine Elizabeth Cousens after the death, on 27 May 1888, of his first wife in giving birth to a stillborn.

He was commissioned by the Victorian Government to document, for a series of promotional lantern slide lectures, the Chaffey brothers' pioneering irrigation works on the River Murray at Mildura in north-west Victoria.

supported Lindt's further expeditions, first to the New Hebrides in 1890 where in June he climbed the Tanna volcano, and to Fiji in 1891 during which he documented a fire-walking ceremony,[43][44] first published as plates in the Transactions of the R.G.S, that were hailed as proof that the traditional ordeal did exist and was not a visual figment of group hysteria.

[50] Though he suffered from anti-German sentiment during and after WW1, and had to defend himself when a public meeting was called at the local shire council hall to demand that he be sent to a concentration camp, Lindt continued to sell prints from his older glass negatives and from new photographs he took of his forest home, guests in his gardens, and genre scenes.

[53] Lindt's staged studio spectacles of indigenous people are now regarded as exemplifying a colonial attitude that the Australian aborigine was an inferior, dying race whose inevitable vanishment was a romantic curiosity that warranted a photographic record.

[9][54][55] In the field, in New Guinea, his marketable imagery of the 'mysterious shores of Papua and their savage inhabitants'[56] were posed, by subjects bribed or coerced to do so, against suitably picturesque backgrounds chosen by Lindt, and thus are no more accurate as ethnographic records than his studio tableaux,[57] and are loaded with romance and prejudice derived from his reading of British accounts and diaries of colonialists' adventures in Africa.

[58] Quanchi criticises the voyeuristic intention of the cover image, widely reproduced and imitated, of Picturesque New Guinea, which shows an adolescent, bare-breasted, partially clothed Motu girl carrying a pot on her shoulder.

[4] Lindt's landscapes, even his earliest made along the Orara River, a tributary of the Clarence, have continued to earn praise as fine examples of 'proto-' Pictorialism; he being regarded as "one of the first photographers to use the camera creatively to move beyond recording to make evocative pictures...recognised nationally and internationally for his artistic contribution to the development of photography.

[60] However in the case of Lindt's New Guinea landscapes, Ryan shows that he used the presence of indigenous inhabitants for aesthetic appeal, adding or subtracting figures to make a picturesque effect in support of a colonialist ideology.