Blanche Violet Maher was the eldest of seven children born in 1872 to Mathew Maher and Sarah Thompson. From the age of 15 Blanche and her family moved to a property called Collaroy Station near Muswellbrook and Cassilis in the Upper Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia. This property managed by Mathew Maher was responsible for much of the improvement in the Merino Sheep Breed. Blanche married Alfred Jennings in 1900, the son of the first Catholic Premier of NSW. They had three girls, one of whom was my grandmother. Blanche was passionate about photography and used two glass plate techniques: wet collodion and dry plates both of which she developed herself. Her images taken after 1900 were developed from film introduced in Australia in 1900. 

In 2011 I found an image in a Calcutta junk shop and had the image cleaned and restored. Through my investigations, I found the woman in the portrait was the Maharani of Cooch Behar, the mother of the famous Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur. I wrote an article for Vogue India (link).
During the eight years of researching this remarkable Indian family, I appreciated the importance of family history, properly archived information and of the amazing stories that are lost without documentation.
Rummaging through boxes in my mother's attic storage, I moved photographs and books into proper archival boxes and started to uncover the extraordinary photos of Blanche Violet Maher.
As well as her photographs, there was a notebook marked "Photography Notes" "January 1894" including Blanche's signature in elegant, slanting cursive. When you flipped the book around in the same immaculate cursive Blanche had written Recipes for Cookery and included some beautifully transcribed recipes and knitting patterns. Born in 1872, these were the recipes and formulas of a 22 year old woman, except Blanche's formulas were complex chemical processes and procedures to develop photographic plates.
In 2020 when Covid threw the world into turmoil, like many I found solace in an inner world and went to Rachel Knepfer at the Australian Centre for Photography to see whether the project had any merit.
There are few records of Victorian-era female photographers. The most celebrated are the English photographers, Julia Margaret Cameron and Lady Clementina Hawarden. Blanche’s work as a photographer stands out for its beauty and skill. 
As a family we are immensely proud of Blanche as our ancestor - a woman who followed her passion as an artist.

– Julia Booth, 2020