Based
on text from the original book: Shades of Light:
Photography and Australia 1839-1988
Gael Newton, 1988 Australian National Gallery
Chapter 12 Commerce and Commitment
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Photographic
illustration and the Documentary movement
in the 1940s and
1950s
The
New Photography with its altruistic and ambitious aims to reveal
the ‘abstract aesthetic charm’ of
the world, also proved to be perfectly suited to product
advertising used
in illustrated magazines in the I930s. Pictorial professionals
like Cazneaux in Australia and Edward Steichen in America
developed a visual vocabulary for glamorising a range of subjects
including
film stars. Advertising as a separate, multifaceted industry
accompanied a general growth in production after World War
One but accelerated most after the Depression years of the
1930s.
The
earliest fashion photographs were simple compositions showing
pretty girls in frocks. In the late 1920s elaborate
fashion tableaux
developed for window displays by specialist designers like
Harry Bhindof for the David Jones Store were photographed
by Cecil
Bostock. Soon tableaux were being created in the studios
by a collaboration of photographers and coordinators.
Russell
Roberts (b.1904) began selling advertising and organising
the fashion photography for Ure Smith’s publications
in 1931. Before the collapse of the automobile industry during
the Depression, Roberts had handled the sales and promotional
work
for Chrysler Motors in Australia. For six months in 1927,
he had worked in the headquarters of the firm in America
and
experienced
the missionary zeal and scale of their promotions. Working
for Ure Smith he quickly realised the potential for an advertising
agency which could provide a range of services. Russell
Roberts
Pty Ltd was established in 1932 and by the time his studio
work was included in the Contemporary Camera Groupe exhibition,
the
staff of designers and photographers had reached thirty(1).
In addition to glamour studio work, Roberts’ studio
was distinguished by more naturalistic fashion photography
shot
on location in
the European manner pioneered by such talents as Martin
Munkacsi (1896-1963)(2).
Among
the many photographers who passed through the studio was
Hans Hasenpflug (1907-1977) who worked there from 1935
to 1937, after his arrival as an immigrant from Germany
in 1927. Hasenpflug taught himself photography and combined
the new style
of photographing models in action with the geometric
design of the New Photography. Hasenpflug exhibited work
in the sesquicentenary
salon in the pictorial, commercial and portrait sections
and was regarded as one of the moderns(3). Other
work of his also appeared under the Roberts’ studio
imprint which usually did not credit individual photographers.
Hasenpflug would have
been a likely contender for the Contemporary Camera
Groupe, however he had moved to the Melbourne studio
of Athol Shmith
by late
1938.
Laurence
Le Guay (b.1917) established a studio in Martin Place in 1938
and was accepted as a member of
the Contemporary
Camera
Groupe. Le Guay served his apprenticeship in
an old-style studio, the Dayne, and began exhibiting
in Pictorial
salons in 1936.
As an independent he quickly developed an energetic
style that often featured outdoor action fashion
shots. Le
Guay remained
at the top of fashion photography in Sydney throughout
the ensuing decades. His later works like the Ayers
Rock fashion
illustration
and his Fashion queue picture of the 1950s represent
a refinement of this genre. Le Guay also experimented
with
the montaged
surrealist pieces that interested Dupain and others
as the vogue for surrealism
swept the magazines after 1935(4).
Surrealist
imagery demanded a gift for simple but effective
conjunctions of seemingly mismatched objects
which
had to have some pictorial
and poetic or theatrical force. Dupain’s Shattered
intimacy and impassioned clay of 1936 achieved
a willing suspension of
disbelief—the flesh of a female torso and
a spiral shell meld into each other, suggesting
a transcendental
interchangeability
of all matter(5). Other
montages of the period now appear forced and pretentious.
Some
of the qualities of surrealist imagery appeared
in product advertising such as Dupain’s
Hoover and Hardy’s Hose
Company advertisements. Dupain introduced a sensuality
virtually unprecedented in Australian photography
particularly with his
nudes of the 1930s and 40s. Sexual freedom, at
least of the imagination, was part of the vogue
for surrealism and psychology(6).
One
of the most imaginative and adept of the specialised
fashion studios was that of Athol
Shmith in Melbourne.
His career grew
out of his publicity photographs taken as an
amateur for a theatrical show in 1932, and
developed through
social
portraiture to fashion
shots after beset up his studio in 1933(7). Some
of his portraits of later years owe a debt
to the moody
lighting
of earlier
Pictorialists like May and Mina Moore and Ruth
Hollick.
Glamorous
advertising work necessitated a reasonable studio establishment
and as manipulation
techniques
and the complex
coordinating of
props developed, the larger studios became
the training ground for younger photographers.
Despite
a certain ‘macho’ image
which surrounded the illustration photographers
in the 1930s, a number of women worked in the
field.
Olive
Cotton (b.1911) joined Max Dupain, with whom she had shared an
amateur interest in photography in their teens, in his studio
in Bond Street, set up in 1934. Cotton quickly acquired technical
polish and by 1935 an advertisement for a tea service became
Teacup ballet with its mix of New Photography geometrics and
surreal atmosphere. In 1938 Cotton was the only woman member
of the short-lived Contemporary Camera Groupe showing
landscape and form studies. Cotton managed Dupain's studio from
1941-1945
during his war service, as well as taking on war-related commissions
of her own. Marriage and parenting after the war brought her
city career to an end but in later years Cotton opened a portrait
studio in Cowra and recently held a successful retrospective
of her life-work(8).
Margot
Donald (b.1923), who worked as a colourist at Russell Roberts’ studio,
acquired expertise in photography during her training there. She produced sophisticated
advertisements for My Joy Gloves around 1947 prior to her departure to London
to further her career in English advertising studios(9).
As
a result of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s, several well trained
and cultured photographers immigrated to Australia. Margaret Michaelis (1902-1985)
and Wolfgang Sievers (b.1913) both arrived in 1939. Michaelis trained at
the Graphik Institute in Vienna and later worked in Spain with
her husband, taking
documentary photographs before the ascendancy of General Franco led to her
immigration to Australia. Michaelis worked mostly in portraiture since few
opportunities
for the kind of reportage she had done in Barcelona were available. She did
a number of commissions for the Gertrude Bodenweiser School of Modern Dance
in
Sydney. Michaelis deliberate and considered work was valued by her contemporaries
despite a generally quiet profile in photographic circles(10). She
was awarded a medal at the Australian Photography Salon of 1947 and had work
published
in the book recording this exhibition published by Oswald Ziegler.
Wolfgang
Sievers came from a cultured family in Germany and aspired to become an
archaeologist for which he improved his amateur skills in photography.
After a brief period in exile in Portugal, Sievers returned to Germany
to
study at
the Contempora College of Applied Arts in Berlin. Teachers from the closed
Bauhaus School also taught there and Sievers learnt much about the philosophy
of modern
architecture from architect Erich Mendelssohn. The Contempora School functioned
in part to provide short training courses in trades for those who needed
to flee Germany. Hoppé’s book on Australia suggested the country
as a suitable place to immigrate.
Sievers
specialised in industrial photography from his arrival and set
up a studio in this field after Australian war
service in 1945. His approach
to
industrial
assignments reflected the hopes of the Bauhaus for a union between workers
and industrial production which would retain the dignity of traditional
craftsmen(11). Sievers’ photographs
often show workers calmly pursuing their tasks with satisfaction, unawed
by the monstrous scale of their environment.
In industrial
coverage, Sievers pioneered imagery that became the basic patterns adopted
by later generations(12).
On
arrival in Australia Sievers had found that few photographers
understood his approach
to industrial and architectural subjects, with the exception
of Dupain,
whose direct contact with the European sources of the modern movement
in architecture was via illustrations in books. After World War Two,
Dupain turned to architecture
and industry for his main commissions as a response to the influence
of
the Documentary movement. This movement was named and articulated by
film maker
John Grierson
who believed it had a high moral and social purpose(13).
The faith of the New Photography in the moral value of revealing the
beauty and
order in the forms
of the world remained an integral aspect of Dupain’s understanding
of actuality as a subject(14).
The Documentary movement
1940s—1950s
The
sesquicentenary was commemorated with other uses of photography
than the salons of the Pictorialists. Oswald
Ziegler published
a massive illustrated tome that functioned as the Picturesque
Atlas had for the centenary(15).
The layout was similarly progressive, using montage and
graphic
design intercut. Many of its photographs
illustrating Australia’s industrial and agricultural
progress were drawn from newspaper archives, wherein the bones
of the nineteenth-century
views trade resided. The colour photography was commissioned
from Frank Hurley. A few Cazneaux mining photographs appeared
uncredited
but the art photographer was obviously not required. In the
perverse tribute to the Aboriginal people, described as a ‘dying
race’,
much use was made of Aboriginal motifs. Central Australia had
become fashionable, replacing the bush as a national myth.
In 1934 Walkabout magazine was first
published by the Australian Tourism Board.
A
different attitude to the role of the photographer was evident
in overseas magazines
such as LIFE. Their photoessay layout combined
room for personal vision as well as information about the
world(16) In Perth in the mid
1930s, Axel Poignant (1906-1986) was excited by the photo-essay
and made some experiments
with the
format. By
1938 he was producing images showing the lessons learnt from
the New Photography in the use of angles and close-ups to
communicate a reverence for the subject. This attitude came
partly from
his Theosophical beliefs that stressed the unity of all creation,
and
some from the
stimulating ideas of friends like Vincent Serventy and the
Naturalist
Club and the active left wing political circles in Perth
at this time(17).
Poignant
turned increasingly to the subjects that represented the essence
of
Australia, the outback and its inhabitants,
its flora
and fauna. The body of his work which shows the Aboriginals,
the old fossickers, and the rich variety of native animals
suggests that
Poignant may also have seen the subjects as embodying purity
or the lost innocence of a pioneer era(180).
Poignant
formed a friendship with graphic artist and photographer
Hal Missingham (b.1906) who had returned from study and
work in Europe to his home town of Perth in 1940. They
held a
joint exhibition
in
1941. The rhetoric of the catalogue was not so bold as
the Contemporary Camera Groupe’s claim to prophetic
modernity but stated that the work was in the spirit
of the New Photography and the
social
aims of the Documentary film. Alex King, writing in the
foreword, presented photography as a revealer of the
world through its
ability to make the viewer see things clearly and freshly
as a child. Its
role in a frenetic machine age was potentially regenerative(19).
The
Contemporary Camera Groupe exhibition had been the
earliest to present exclusively a Modernist approach
to photography.
It included
abstraction, montage, surrealist themes and landscapes
with some of the poetic overtones of Pictorialist idealism.
The
Missingham-Poignant
Exhibition in Perth was about things, people and places
presented simply and directly with concern to communicate
specific
qualities and arouse interest in the original subject
as much as admiration
for the independent Pictorial photograph. In this spirit
of hoped for direct communication from viewer to subject
via the
vision
of the photographer, Poignant and Missingham presented
one of the first
demonstration of the Documentary philosophy in art
photography. The mediation of the photographer’s vision distinguished
their work from simple record photographs.
In
Sydney in 1946 Laurence Le Guay began publication of a new photography
magazine called Contemporary Photography. The AP-R. published by the
KODAK Company was still popular and had begun to include a program
of historical
articles of great value, but its market was the amateur and the
commercial studio. The magazine had given support to the New
Photography and the Documentary movement but a need was felt
for a magazine
more in tune with contemporary photographers both professional
and amateur. The new magazine also included historical features:
In 1952 Cazneaux reprinted his old Sydney work dating from 1904
for a special issue(20) which
recast him in the current documentary spirit. The new large,
brighter prints made by Cazneaux, brought
out the human interest of the subjects that was lost in the
small vintage prints made before World War One. Keast Burke
at this
time rediscovered the great Holtermann collection and as the
old negatives
were reprinted as modern enlargements these also attracted
interest from the Documentary movement enthusiasts. A lineage
for local
Australian work was suggested by the stimulus of the publication
of historical works.
Younger
photographers interested in the reportage of the scene around
them used Contemporary Photography as
a showcase for their
work.
Many of these like David Moore, David Potts, Geoffrey
Powell and Axel Poignant wished for the kind of extended essays
being featured
in the overseas illustrated magazines such as Life, Picture
Post and the Observer. Walkabout could have taken on such a role
but avoided the wide ranging and more dramatised photo essays
of the great
overseas
models.
Dupain
was introduced to the Documentary philosophies of John Grierson
through an edited anthology of his writings
and through
contact with
Damien Parer, a young photographer working in his studio,
was a committed exponent of the Documentary film(21). Grierson
opposed
art-for-arts-sake
work and presented a functionalist and social realist philosophy
which allowed that art was the by-product of a job well done
when it had some higher aim of helping the public understand
the world
around them.
Grierson’s
concept of the creative treatment of actuality appealed to
Dupain as a path between romantic
subjectivity and literalism.
War service during World War Two took him to New Guinea
in the camouflage unit but it was his transfer to the Department
of Information in
1945-1947 that provided Dupain with his first real
opportunity to develop his Documentary philosophy. He travelled
extensively,
making images for use in the promotion of Australia. One
of his best known photographs The meat queue was made for
an assignment on queuing
for rations. It is a powerful scene in which the compression
of space and the monumental shapes of the dark dresses
convey
the fatigue
and tedium of the queues. The women appear to be almost
in place of the carcasses of meat in the butcheries. It is
not
a compassionate
image, Dupain’s interests were not in social conditions
but in the revelatory moment.
In
1948 Sydney Ure Smith published a monograph on Dupain. The
images and text give priority
to the Documentary spirit.
It
was the second
only such publication on a photographer as an artist
since Kauffmann’s
1919 monograph. In the foreword Dupain described the
selection of images as 'my best work since 1935'. The
surrealist works and form studies of the mid-1930s were excluded
as
Dupain had dropped
the fashion and advertising work from his studio. The
monograph also contained 'Some Notes about Photography',
one of Dupain’s
earliest efforts at sustained critical writing:
Nearly
all the photographs in this volume have been made with the
intention of securing a fragmentary impression
of passing
movement
or changing form; in the portraits and figures 1 have
tried to save the nonchalance and spontaneity of mood
. . . Modern
photography
must do more than entertain, it must incite thought
and, by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic
understanding of
men and women and the life they create and live(22).
Dupain’s
monumental Sunbaker of a decade earlier was also
included in the monograph, beginning its path towards the iconic
status it
now has. It was little published or exhibited during
the war
years or afterwards until the 1970s.
Its
simple geometry and dynamic symmetry had perfectly
expressed the energy of Modernist formalism.
Made at the time of the
sesquicentenary, the Sunbaker was also an image
of ownership of the land; the white
man is nearly black and safe within his environment
that he can lie face down. However, the Second
World War carried
away
much of the
confidence of the Modernists expressed in this
image.
Dupain
returned to his studio in 1947 and increasingly sought work
in architectural illustration and
industrial commissions
forming
long relationships with leading architects
such as Harry Seidler and companies like CSR. The construction
of the
Sydney Opera
House in the 1960s and 1970s provided him with
an
opportunity to cover,
at his own initiative, the building of the
greatest
monument to the same kind of pure forms at
the heart of his own
photography. Portraiture,
figure and landscape studies continued to form
an important part of his personal work throughout the
I950s. People
tend to disappear
from Dupain’s work in later years and
his formalism becomes more austere. His photographs
seek to extract a quintessential
essence from the forms of diagonals, ovals
and
cylinders held in dynamic
tension that first appeared as his formal signature
in the I930s.
In
1947 Oswald Ziegler published Australian Photography 1947 as
the first of
a planned
annual series
covering the best
of Australian
photography. It was a substantial book with
pages of quality illustrations drawn from
the works
submitted for the accompanying
exhibition. It
was in the tradition of both the old Pictorial
salon catalogues and the newer annuals such
as US Camera
Annual. Pictorial
work was included
as well as technical categories but the book
validated the importance of the documentary
photographers and
professional illustrators.
Cazneaux
considered the book a wasted and spoilt opportunity
by its support for what
seemed
soulless or ugly modern
photography(23). The
Documentary followers no doubt felt the
amateur Pictorial work was trite and sentimental.
The photographers
in Australian Photography with
a social bent included David Moore (b.1927)
(son of the
Modernist
architect) and painter John D. Moore, who
began his professional career in Russell
Roberts’ studio in 1947. The vigour
and naturalism of Dupain’s Documentary
and architectural work attracted him more
than the advertising of Roberts’ studio
that was struggling to recover from the
loss of activity and manpower during the
war.
Moore
worked in Dupain’s studio
from 1948 until 1951 doing a variety
of architectural, commercial and industrial
assignments.
In his own time Moore photographed the
slum areas of Sydney in around 1948.
He also photographed the foreshores, harbour
and city, emphasising
the richness of this environment. In
some ways his body of work provided a contemporary
parallel to Cazneaux’s earlier
tribute to the old Sydney areas. Cazneaux
wrote
some print analysis criticisms for Contemporary Photography and
found Moore’s
pictures of slum children appealing(24). Other
images, such as the picture of a mother
and new baby and an older woman in a
Redfern
tenement from which they faced eviction,
were not in the picturesque mode that
Pictorialists could respond to. The image
did appeal
to Edward Steichen who
included it in The Family of Man exhibition
in 1955.
Moore
made extended photo-essays, including a series on the turning
around
of the
ship Himalaya
in Sydney
Harbour
in
1951. He was able
to arrange a working passage to London
with the Orient Line and hoped to travel
on to
Canada to work in
the stills department
of the Canadian
Film Board. On arrival in England,
Moore was able to sell his picture story on
the Himalaya
to the Sphere magazine
and editors
also responded
to his slum pictures. His career as
a photojournalist was set and he spent
the next seven years
working as a freelance
photojournalist
for the leading illustrated magazines.
He returned to Australia in
1958 and has been based here since,
although many assignments have taken him on extensive
travels.
Lack
of local outlets for photojournalistic work led other photographers
to Europe.
David Potts
(b.1926) worked in
Russell Roberts’ and
Laurence Le Guay’s studios
in Sydney in 1948-1950 before
leaving for London and a career as
a photojournalist. Prior to his departure
Potts photographed the real-life
characters associated
with Documentary work accompanying
David Moore on weekend excursions.
Potts’ work was animated and
often emotional in mood(26).
Other
photographers were more socially
committed in their Documentary
work than the elegant
photojournalists. Edward
Cranstone (b.1903)
and Geoffrey Powell (b.1918) were
involved with left
wing politics and stressed the
dignity of work and the plight
of the socially
disadvantaged(27). Cranstone’s
commissions for the Department
of Information depicted workers
with
the heroic proportions,
gusto and vitality of the early
German New Photography(28).
Axel
Poignant was able to eke out
a precarious existence through
the sale
of pictures
in the 1940s. A major
undertaking during
these years was his 1952 series
of photographs recording the
Aboriginal people in the far north Liverpool
River area. Poignant’s
commitment to his work with the
Aboriginals went even deeper
than the conscious
search for the grim urban realities
of Sydney by his younger contemporaries.
He hoped that to see sensitive
pictures would
generate understanding
and in this attitude he was close
in spirit to the beliefs that
led to The Family of Man exhibition.
Poignant
found no outlet in Australia
for his Liverpool River stories,
although a
children’s storybook Piccaninny
Walkabout was made during
his northern travels and published
in 1957(29). As Bush
Walkabout it is still finding a response
in
contemporary families.
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footnotes | contents | search-shades
List
of illustrations used in the original publication (captions may
be abbreviated):
P.115:
Russell Roberts Studio: Fashion Illustration for Valerie Hats,
1936
P.116:
Hans Hasenpfug: Rhapsody in satin, 1937
P.116:
Laurence Le Guay: Fashion queue, 1960s
P.117:
Laurence Le Guay: Ayers Rock fashion illustration for Courtlands.
1959
P.118:
Max Dupain: Impassioned clay. 1937
P.119:
Athol Shmith. Vivien leigh. 1948
P.120:
Olive Cotton: Teacup ballet.1935
P.121:
Margot Donald: Patricia. c.1946
P.121:
Wolfgang Sievers: Gears for mining industry, Vickers Ruwolt.
1967
P.122:
Axel Poignant: Aboriginal girl and new born baby. 1942
p.122:
Hal Missingham: Mother's knees. 1941
P.123:
Max Dupain: The meat queue. 1946
P.124:
Max Dupain: Sunbaker. 1937
P.125:
David Moore: Pyrmont Bridge, Sydney. 1947
P.126:
David Moore: Redfern Interior. 1949
P.127:
David Potts: Henley Regatta: 1954
P.128:
Edward Cranstone: Civil construction corps worker. c.1943
P.128:
Geoffrey Powell: Self-portrait, bailing water. 1947
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