Robert Vere Scott

Robert Vere Scott (1877, Brisbane –c.1944 United States of America) was an Australian Pictorialist photographer known for his panoramic views.

Robert Vere Scott was born in Brisbane in 1877, son of a Scottish immigrant storekeeper father and an Australian mother, the seventh of their ten children.

Photo historian Gael Newton has determined from the 16.0 x 50.0 cm format of his photograph "Camels and men gather at the start of the expedition to survey the Trans-Australian Railway"[3] that he was using a Kodak Panoram No.

For example, he produced panoramic pictures of Melbourne,[8] and of Auckland, Sydney and Brisbane (held by the State Library of New South Wales) and dated around 1904.

An article in The Adelaide Register of 19 December 1907 declared that Vere Scott had “‘recently imported the largest panoramic camera that had yet been brought to the Commonwealth, and that it was designed to take pictures 24 x 9 inches”.

Scott was issuing panoramic postcards and in 1908, after a move to Western Australia, was invited to judge the Boulder Technical School Camera Club competition.

He embraced the Pictorialist photography movement that was particularly advanced in Adelaide in these years due largely to its promotion by Adelaide-born art photographer John Kauffmann (1864-1942).

[17] He contributed panoramic and other imagery of nautical activities on San Francisco Bay to yachting and boating magazines,[18][19][20][21] and his pictures, examples of which he donated to the California Historical Society in 1936,[22] provide a valuable record of the landscape of the city.

Some fifty works are held in Australian public and private collections: The fate of the Scott archive is unknown, and none of his negatives are known to have survived.