This picture preserves a moment few cameras ever caught — Tiger, Tiger: This is the last known Tasmanian tiger, also known as a thylacine or Tasmanian wolf. Like the best archival images, it needs almost no explanation — the frame tells its own story.
Fanny Cochrane Smith was an Aboriginal Tasmanian woman who recorded songs in the Tasmanian language onto wax cylinders between 1899 and 1903. Those recordings are the only audio of any Tasmanian Aboriginal language ever made, which gives the photographs of her recording sessions extraordinary documentary value.
Pictures of ordinary life are some of the most valuable historical documents we have. Grand events were always going to be recorded, but a normal day — how people worked, dressed, shopped, and passed the time — survives only when someone happened to point a camera at it.
