Harold Cazneaux main introduction page
Through a different lens: Cazneaux by the Water
This article published in the Martitime Museum magazine: Signals Quarterly #116, September, October, November 2016
A new exhibition of the photographs of Harold Cazneaux is on now at the museum. Combining famous and lesser-known images with personal albums and mementoes, it surveys the life and long career of this renowned pictorialist, writes Senior Curator Daina Fletcher.
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| 01 Harold Cazneaux, A study in curves, 1931, gelatin silver photograph, chloro bromide, matt print. It shows the Chilean Naval Training Ship General Barquedano in September 1931 and reflects pictorialist themes contrasting the old and the new. ANMM Collection 00054649 |
Photographer Harold Cazneaux (1878–1953) is a giant in the history of Australian photography. In the late 1890s he became interested in the idea of photography as art, rather than a mechanical recording process, when he was exposed to the work of European photographers working in a new, dominant photographic style known as the pictorialist movement. He was to become its most passionate advocate in Australia – exploring poetry, mood and form through his impressionistic ‘seeing’ eye. His camera art captured the romance, light and life in the world as it changed around him.
Over the course of the next 50 years Cazneaux produced some of Australia’s iconic photographic images, including Razzle Dazzle (1911), The Japanese blind (1915) and in 1937 The spirit of endurance, his powerful image of a eucalypt rising from, and clinging to, the dry South Australian earth.
Water, too, interested him. It was the perfect medium for his experimentations with creating mood, atmosphere and impression on the picture plane. An exhibition of more than 50 original works at the museum presents this new dimension to Cazneaux’s work, reflecting how the water and Sydney Harbour fit within his oeuvre, his signature pictorial photographic style and his foray into modernism and abstract form.
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| 02 Harold Cazneaux, Mort’s Dock, Balmain, c 1923, gelatin silver photograph, chloro bromide print. ANMM Collection 00054644 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Anne Christoffersen, in memory of the artist |
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| 03 Harold Cazneaux, Old houseboat Kerosene Bay, c 1907, gelatin silver photograph, chloro bromide, matt print. The image shows the remains of the City of Melbourne as a houseboat in what is now Balls Head Bay, Sydney. ANMM Collection 00054648 |
Cazneaux was born into the commercial studio system. Both his parents, Emma (Emily, née Bentley) and Pierce Mott Cazneau worked as camera operators or colourists. Harold Cazneaux (who added the ‘x’ to his surname in 1904) was born in 1878 in Wellington, New Zealand, where his parents worked after moving from Sydney. Eight years later the family was back in Australia, eventually settling in Adelaide, where his father worked as chief camera operator at Hammer & Co.
After moving to Sydney in 1904, Cazneaux began his artistic explorations in earnest as he became immersed in the energetic harbour city with its industry, enterprise and life. He travelled its waters on Sydney’s ferries to and from work every day from the home he made in North Sydney with his wife Winifred, whom he had met at Hammer.
He said of Sydney’s main ferry terminus, Circular Quay:
Here on suitable mornings, one can simply revel in pictorial work, especially if there is a slight mist about, which gives great effect to the ferry boats arriving and departing every few minutes. For figure work get on the pontoons or landing stages and, if you practice your ‘seeing eye’, pictures will occur in all directions...1
He met with early success in 1904 when he won a photographic competition for a view of two fishermen at Bondi, titled Fishing off the rocks. In 1909 he held his first solo exhibition to great acclaim.
The exhibition begins with a small print of Fishing off the rocks and a series of small photographs taken around waterways in Sydney and along the New South Wales coastline. In particular Sydney Harbour scenes: Boy on a raft presents a soft-focus view of a young boy mucking about on a lump of wood and gazing into the distance. It entices us to explore Cazneaux’s maritime work as he develops his technique, practice and reputation.
Cazneaux was a strong adherent to the European style of pictorialism, largely producing wistful, feathered, impressionistic work of low tonal contrast, produced to elevate ordinary subjects, such as Gas works, Kerosene Bay (c 1920), to images taken ‘at the poet’s hour when evening mist and smoke descend and smudge the hard lines of architecture transforming “warehouses into palaces” as Whistler says’.2
Subject, timing and technique were important tenets for both taking and processing photographs, and Cazneaux and his cohort photographers found their aesthetic freedom in careful composition, cropping and printing, but also by melding elements such as sky to enhance the drama or effect of the picture.
Cazneaux’s career as an amateur photographic artist was in its ascendancy, even with the limited availability of materials due to World War I. In 1914 Cazneaux won £100 in a Kodak ‘happy moments’ competition with ten views of his family at various locations, including Rainbow and Jean at Berry’s Bay, seen in the exhibition.
Seeking out an Australian response and ‘something more refined and progressive’, in 1916 Cazneaux and a select group from the Photographic Society of NSW – including Cecil Bostock, James Paton and James Stening – formed the Sydney Camera Circle. They aimed ‘more at the effects of mystery and sunshine – both so peculiar to the Australian bush’.3
Cazneaux wrote:
... the majority of our workers are making use of sunlight as the main theme of their pictures … The pictorial rendering is oft-times very difficult owing to the extreme clearness of atmosphere and absence of haze or mist …4
Work from the society’s members featured in the Photographic Society of New South Wales exhibition of November 1917, and work from four of its seven active members was selected for the following London Salon of 1918, including Young Australia by Cazneaux (which features in this exhibition) and The Japanese blind. These works by Cazneaux made an impact on artist and reviewer Sydney Ure Smith.
This forged a lifelong relationship with Ure Smith, who became an influential publisher of The Home magazine, Art in Australia and many other titles. He contracted Cazneaux to his mastheads and through his innovative sense of design in art, advertising and architecture he nurtured in the fervent pictorialist a modernist sensibility in which abstraction, angle and form became as important to him as mood and message – ambitions that Cazneaux never surrendered. |
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04 Harold Cazneaux, Sydney Harbour scenes: Boy on a raft, 1905, gelatin silver photograph, ANMM Collection 00054641 Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by
Anne Christoffersen, in memory of the artist
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| 05 Harold Cazneaux, The bamboo blind, 1915, gelatin silver photograph. Exhibited first as The Japanese blind, this view of light effects and his daughter Beryl made a huge impact in London and Sydney. Reproduced courtesy the Cazneaux family |
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The exhibition covers the private family world of Cazneaux at his home in Roseville in family albums, his account and appointment books, travelling bag and duster coat from days on the road, and his studio life. It also explores his early experimentations, poetic river and harbour scenes, and the larger muscular industrial waterscapes: ships arriving and departing, boating views, wharves, wharf workers, bridge and beach views, scenes around harbour nooks, and his coastal views from trips to South Australia in the 1930s – all printed in Cazneaux’s studio.
The exhibition concludes with All’s clear, a large, strong portrait of Captain Firth, the recently retired master of SS Canberra. As Cazneaux intended, his images take you to an inner world and also today, in 2016, to another world – the lost waterscapes of a century ago.
In 1952 Cazneaux was honoured in a travelling presentation of his work mounted by photographer and writer Jack Cato. He died in 1953 and was cremated at Sydney’s Northern Suburbs Crematorium.
Senior Curator, Daina Fletcher.
Notes
- In and about in Sydney with a hand held camera’, The Australasian Photo-review, 22 September 1910
- From a review by Harrington’s Photographic Journal of Cazneaux’s image of Pyrmont Bridge in the NSW Photographic Society exhibition of 1915.
- Cecil Bostock, ‘Pictorial Photography in Australia’, Photograms of the year 1917–18.
- Harold Cazneaux, ‘Pictorial Photography in Australia’, Photograms of the year 1919. Through a different lens – Cazneaux by the water is on at the museum from 2 September 2016 to 5 February 2017.
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