Ernest Lund Mitchell

Ernest Lund Mitchell was borne in Yorkshire and emigrated to Australia with his parents in 1884. The family returned to England in 1891, and Ernest was an apprentice print maker. He migrated to Sydney in 1899, having already become established as a photographer and owning good cameras. 

E.L Mitchell's photographs dominated the Western Australian commercial and official markets from 1909 until the late 1920s. He undertook private commissions and was engaged by commercial clients, such as the Western Mail, and several State government departments. After winning a gold medal at the Samarang Exhibition, Java, in 1914, he was appointed official photographer to the governor of Western Australia. Mitchell's images of landscapes, towns, primary industry and Aboriginal people in the Kimberley and the Pilbara and at the Moore River Mission were widely reproduced in government publications. His pictures received an international audience as part of the official pearling display at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924, and one was published in the 1929 edition of The Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Through reproduction in official Immigration and General Information Department publications, Mitchell's work helped to shape international perceptions of Australia and Western Australia. By 1914 his photographs were incorporated into collections of the Western Australian government printer and the London offices of the agent-general and the Australian High Commission, and were widely distributed through picture agencies. They were used in geography and history texts, adventure narratives, pictorial atlases and encyclopaedias, official advertisements to migrants in England, lantern slide shows and picture postcards