Biography (SILVER
AND GREY ONLINE)
(CAPTAIN) FRANK HURLEY 1885-1962
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James
Francis Hurley was born in Sydney and left school when he was around
13. His early years are not clear with reports of him undergoing
some electrical engineering technical training, working
at Eskbank Ironworks in Lithgow, as well as working for the Postal
and Telegraph Office in Central Sydney. Sometime in the early 1990s
he became an amateur photographer and was quickly very enthusiastic
about
and
profient
in photography.
According to Jack Cato in The Story of the Camera
in
Australia, Hurley “saw
in this new toy a key that might unlock the door to adventure”.
Adventure remained the attraction photography had for Hurley, in
particular
challenging
and dangerous
outdoor work.
Around
1905 Hurley’s father, a typographic printer,
bought his son a partnership in Cave & Co studio (photography,
stationery and printing) which specialised in the postcard trade.
Hurley was
soon attracting attention
for
the novelty of his
work. As early as June 1905 Hurley had had a dramatic picture of
a wave breaking published in the Australasian Photo-Review magazine.
By 1909 he was a regular exhibitor in local salons and was making
a
name for himself with night shots of the city done with flash light.
He had became an expert on combination printing and gave lectures
on this technique.
Hurley
was a founder in 1910 of the Ashfield District Camera Club with friends
Henri Mallard and Norman Deck.
That same year he set
up his
own (photographic and stationary) studio in Dalley Street.
By
1911 he was well-known and established professional photographer
and an official in the Photographic Society of New South Wales.
He also appears to have
worked for the government railways. At the time Hurley made dramatic
photographs
of steam trains at full speed where others only shot stationary
engines.
In
December 1911, Hurley achieved his dream of adventure by being appointed
official photographer for Sir Douglas Mawson’s
first Australian Antarctic expedition. He appears to have been
recommended by Henri
Mallard, who arranged for Hurley’s outstanding accounts
with Harrington’s and Baker & Rouse to be deferred,
and also gave him a crash course in 16mm filming techniques.
Kodak acquired the Dalley
Street studio.
Hurley’s
adventures with the Mawson expedition have been well documented elsewhere.
Hurley’s photographs
were used in Mawson’s
book The Home of the Blizzard (1913) and his fame
as a photographer was further established by his own lecture
and lantern slide
talks. Hurley immediately took off on a motor car expedition
to Queensland
and the Northern Territory with Francis Birtles, from which
he was summoned to South America to join Sir Ernest Shackleton’s
Antarctic expedition on the ship Endurance.
The ship became
icebound but the
crew endured, and Hurley returned to London with them in
1916. He then joined the Australian Infantry Force.
Hurley’s
war photographs, often made more dramatic by combination
printing as in plates 47 (A Battlefield cemetery, 1918)
and 48 (The Morning after the Battle of Passchendaele, 1917), were
exhibited in London and Sydney in 1919 and added to the reputation
for dramatic
photography
that his polar expedition work had earned him. Hurley also
went on later expeditions
to Antarctica, the first in 1929, again with Sir Douglas
Mawson.
In
1934 Hurley returned to Australia and worked as a pictorial editor
on The Sun newspaper before joining Cinesound
as
a film cameraman
in 1936. Between the world wars he worked on a number
of commercial and
documentary films, including his own documentaries of
Great Barrier Reef in 1922 - 23 and Pearls and Savages (1924)
about New Guinea.
During
World War II Hurley again served as an official war photographer
in
the Middle East. In 1941 he received an OBE and the
Polar Service Medal for his work.
After
World War II, Hurley did extensive coverage of Australian cities
and industry but the work was not as good as photographs made on
his adventures. He was responsible for the production of numerous "Australiania"
Books as well as promotional cards and calenders. Hurley’s
photographic style was influenced by the imaginative approach to
making
images of the pictorial movement which
was in vogue in his youth, but he was not a pictorialist.
Hurley
published numerous books of photographs on his adventures such
as Argonauts of the South, Voyages in Polar Seas
and Pearls
and Savages
(1924).
the
above text
being an update on the version in Gaël Newton's Silver & Grey
Angus and Roberston, Australia 1980
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Hurley special pages