The son of a prosperous brewer, Alexander Henderson came into the world in Wales in 1831. His grandfather, another Alexander, had established the family firm and become the first chairman of the Bank of Cardiff. Land was something the family held in abundance across Wales: apart from the house they kept in Cardiff, there was Llanfair Estate, some 500 acres of farmland lying roughly 40 miles to the north. Much of Henderson's boyhood was spent at Llanfair Hall, the great house at the estate's northern edge, where the family often stayed and where he would play on the shore near Barmouth or fish the nearby streams.
His schooling, at Caerleon Academy just outside Cardiff, did nothing to loosen his ties to Llanfair, to which he returned most weekends. A three-year apprenticeship in accountancy followed in 1849. The idea of a life in commerce had never appealed to him, yet he saw it through rather than disappoint his relatives. Then, in October 1855, he left for New Zealand together with his wife, Margaret Ross Aitken, the couple making their home in Dunedin.
It was in Dunedin, around 1857, that Henderson taught himself photography, throwing himself into it as a dedicated amateur. Before long he had struck up a friendship, and a working partnership, with Thomas Rennie, an English photographer who had also settled in New Zealand. Together the pair travelled to Sutherland Falls to photograph it in 1860, and five years later they were jointly testing magnesium flares as a means of artificial illumination. Membership of the same societies brought them together as founder members of the Otago Society of Artists, and when that body first convened, in Rennie's studio on 14 March 1860, it was Henderson who took the chair.
Close as the two were, they photographed in markedly different ways. Rennie built his reputation on landscapes of unflinching realism, whereas Henderson, throughout the opening two decades of his working life, turned out romantic pictures that owed a clear debt to the British landscape tradition. He advanced quickly as both artist and technician, and a first substantial set of his landscape photographs appeared in print in 1865. Titled Otago Views and Studies, it never circulated widely, just six copies are known to survive, and because no two copies hold quite the same contents, the work has become a valuable means of assessing his earliest output.
The year 1866 saw him abandon the family firm and set up a photographic studio, where he offered his services in both portraiture and landscape work. Portraits were set aside from around 1870, once he chose to concentrate on landscapes and similar views. Though scenery remained his first love, his many studies of urban life, the streets, the dwellings, the market stalls, teem with people, and even his landscapes were generally arranged around some human occupation: a field being worked, ice being cut from a river, a boat drifting down a wooded creek. Pictures of this sort, along with those he made of the timber trade, steamboats and waterfalls, sold well enough to keep him solvent. Right up to the late 1880s, the elaborate, slow methods and the sheer bulk of the cameras left him with few amateur rivals. Since customers were after images to keep as mementoes of a journey, or to hand on as presents, Henderson kept a stock of prints ready at the studio to be mounted, framed, or slipped into albums.
Exhibitions of his work were frequent, both at home in Dunedin and further afield, in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Melbourne, Sydney and Cape Town. His greatest recognition came in 1877 and 1878 at Melbourne, where landscapes made with the carbon process took first prizes at a show mounted by the firm of Ferrier and Blyth. A second-place award followed in 1879 at the international exhibition in Sydney.
Across the 1870s and 1880s, Henderson's travels took him across Otago and Canterbury, where he recorded the chief towns of both regions and many of Otago's villages. The backcountry held a particular appeal, and he would often take to the Taieri, the Clutha and other well-known southern rivers by skiff. The West Coast drew him back more than once, and in 1872 he made his way by yacht along the southern coastline. During that same coastal journey he first photographed work under way on the Southern Trunk Railway, images that, in 1875, earned him a commission to document the main structures along its nearly finished route between Dunedin and Christchurch. Further railway commissions came his way. Bridges on the Otago and Southland Railway, on the stretch from Dunedin to Invercargill, were the subject of his 1876 work, and in 1885 he followed the Midland Pacific Railway inland as far as Hartley Pass, there recording both the glaciers and how far construction had advanced.
A full-time appointment with the Midland Pacific Railway came in 1892: Henderson was to build and then run a photographic department of its own. Under the terms of the post, four months of every year were to be spent in the field. He set off that summer on a second inland journey, taking photographs all along the line as far as Nelson, and he held the position until 1897, the year he gave up photography for good.
At his death in 1913, the vast store of glass negatives he had amassed lay in the cellar of his home. His photographs are today divided between the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington and the Hocken Collections in Dunedin.
