Emil Riisfeldt, født i Helsingør 1846, død i Sydney 1893.

Christian Bidstrup, 1850-1923, Rønne, med tropehjælm, kindrødt og rose i knaphullet. Han var skibsfører og købmand. Han sejlede i sine unge år som tømmermand, skibstømrer og det er her han blev fotograferet 1873.
Fotografen er Emil Riisfeldt, "photographer in Melbourne".
En Hong Kong fotohistoriker har indsamlet forskelligt om Eiisfeldt. Han var fotograf der i nogle få år: "Riisfeldt’s studio in Hong Kong continued to operate until late 1873, after which the business passed to the Hongkong Photographic Company and Riisfeldt headed for Australia.

Emil Riisfeldt was born in Helsingør, Frederiksborg, Denmark on 29th April 1846 (he was christened Peter Emil Thorwald but he was known as Emil). The Danish census records indicate that he had two brothers, Christian Wilhelm Alfred (1849–1932), known as Alfred, and Christian Henrik Riisfeldt (1853–?). The 1855 Helsingør census shows all three brothers living with their parents, Jørgen and Frederikke. Nothing is currently known of Emil’s childhood, but photo-researcher Sandy Barrie has tracked down Australian descendants who tell him that Emil and his brother, Alfred, travelled the world together in the late 1860s or early 1870s before settling in Australia (with grateful acknowledgment to Sandy Barrie for this information, and also to Ole Madsen and Marcel Safier for tracing Danish genealogical data).




 
Repository: Blue Mountains City Library Part of: Local Studies Collection. Kilde HER

Fotograf E. Riisfeldt, Sydney. Tilhører Anita Engelhardt Albertsen og forestiller en slægtning, der må have været udvandret til Australien i 1870'erne.
Hong Kong 1871-1873
By October 1871 Emil Riisfeldt was in Hong Kong, as we have seen, working for the experienced Chinese photographer, Afong, who described him as ‘a very able Artist.’ It is very likely, therefore, that Riisfeldt had practised photography before arriving in Hong Kong. References to ‘Sets of Views of Hongkong, Japan, Penang and Singapore’ in advertisements placed in the 1873 editions of the Chronicle and Directory for China and the China Directory at least suggest that he may have photographed in the places mentioned prior to opening his studio in Hong Kong.
On leaving Hong Kong Riisfeldt headed for Australia.

Melbourne 1875-1876
In December 1873 he is listed as a passenger on the Christianshaven sailing from Melbourne to Sydney, where, a year later, he married Emma Pyle. The couple had two children: Alfred (1875–1876) and Caroline (1880–c.1956) (information kindly supplied by Marcel Safier). Emil’s brother, Alfred, arrived in Sydney on the Cambridgeshire in 1875. Some time in 1874 Emil opened a studio in Melbourne, at 122 Bourke Street East.

Sydney 1876-1893
By 1876 he was settled in Sydney where he operated a succession of studios at various addresses (see Sands’s Sydney Directory and Sandy Barrie, Australians behind the Camera, 2002, p. 160). Riisfeldt also exhibited at the Calcutta International Exhibition, 1883–1884.
Emil Riisfeldt died at Newtown, New South Wales in 1893.


 
Riisfeldts  family
In 1930 his unmarried daughter, Caroline, is shown in the electoral roll for Sydney working as a music teacher and living with her mother who died that year. Although there are unlikely to be any direct descendants of Emil, his brother Alfred, who lived until 1932, had a larger family and Sandy Barrie has spoken to some descendants who indicated that Emil Riisfeldt lived extravagantly and died leaving his family in debt.So few photographs have so far been attributed to Emil Riisfeldt that it is difficult to make any judgment about his work. In fact, the author believes that existing attributions of Riisfeldt’s work should be treated with some caution.

His time in Hong Kong seems to have been limited to around two years and the fate of his negatives is unknown. However, a number of portraits taken by Riisfeldt in Australia have found their way into private and public collections. Several of his Hong Kong prints are credited in the exhibition catalogue of Horstmann & Godfrey Ltd, Old Photographs of Chinese Cities (1995)."

Kilde og uddrag: HER.
The text and images in the source originally appeared as chapter 1 of "History of Photography in China: Western Photographers 1861–1879", published by Bernard Quaritch in 2010. This is Volume 2 of Terry Bennett's work on China's photo history. They are reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and publisher.