Fred Kruger was born in Germany in 1831 and migrated to Australia in 1860. He worked on the Victorian goldfields as an upholsterer before moving to Melbourne in 1866 to establish a photographic studio. In 1978 Kruger moved his business to Geelong. Throughout the 1870s and 1880s Kruger travelled around Victoria photographing landscapes and the industrial achievements of the colony while maintaining a studio in town. As well as producing a stock of images to be sold as cartes de visite and larger-format empress cards, he secured commissions from local governments and individual pastoralists. He printed his work in a range of formats and sought various ways to exhibit and to circulate his photographs, making him one of the most prolific Victorian photographers in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Kruger died at the height of his photographic career in 1888.

(2014)