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CECIL.
W. BOSTOCK 1884-1939
BOSTOCK AND THE FOUNDING OF THE CIRCLE
The Sydney Camera Circle was formed on 28 November 1916 at the "Little Studio" in Phillip Street, Sydney. The founders were Cecil Bostock, Harold Cazneaux, Malcolm McKinnon, James Paton, James S. Stening and William Stewart White. The Circle's records show that its meetings were held in Bostock's studios until 1921.
Bostock designed the Circle's logo and its "Declaration", and bound albums for the Circle. The Declaration survives at the Art Gallery of New South Wales: watercolour, ink and gilt, signed and dated "C.W. Bostock 1917" (AGNSW 134.1977, gift of Mrs Eleanor Morris 1977).
Bostock was away on war service from 1917 to 1920. During that time Cazneaux worked from Bostock's studio in Denman Chambers, Phillip Street. Bostock was discharged from the army in Sydney in February 1920.
KIICHIRO ISHIDA IN SYDNEY, 1919-1923
Kiichiro Ishida was born in 1886 at Masuda, Akita Prefecture, Japan. From 1910 he worked for the Okura-gumi trading company, which transferred him to Sydney in 1919. In Sydney he took up photography seriously after lessons from Ichiro Kagiyama, a Japanese photographer living in Sydney, who introduced him to the Photographic Society of New South Wales. By 1920 Ishida was exhibiting in Tokyo (Tokyo Shashin Kenkyukai) and at the London Salon.
In April 1921 Ishida was elected to the Sydney Camera Circle, its only non-white member. The Circle had fourteen members that year. Bostock and Ishida were therefore fellow members from April 1921 until Ishida left Sydney at the end of 1923.
D. J. Webster, President of the Photographic Society of NSW, wrote about Ishida in Harringtons' Photographic Journal in 1922. He called him "that photographic meteorite from the East" and described him as a pupil of Cazneaux in the bromoil process. Australian press reports of the 1922 and 1923 London Salons counted Ishida among the Australian exhibitors.
ISHIDA'S DEPARTURE AND THE CIRCLE'S PRINTS
Harringtons' Photographic Journal published "Farewell to Mr K. Ishida" on 1 October 1923. The Circle's annual report for 1923 recorded that "his loss will be felt by us all". Before leaving Sydney, Ishida gave the Circle ten pounds and asked each member for prints as a memento. He took 25 of their prints back to Japan.
In March 1924 he exhibited 15 of these prints, alongside 31 of his own photographs, at the Shiseido Gallery in Ginza, Tokyo. The gallery had been opened in 1919 by Shinzo Fukuhara, Shiseido's president and a leading Japanese art photographer. The exhibition is recorded as "highly praised". Works by Sydney Camera Circle members were later published in the Japanese magazine Asahi Camera in 1926 and 1927.
The sources consulted do not record which members gave prints, or which 15 prints were shown in Tokyo.
1924 IN SYDNEY
In the same year, the Circle's members organised the First Australian Salon of Photography. Bostock edited and designed its catalogue, "Cameragraphs" of the year 1924. He also edited the 1926 volume.
ISHIDA'S LATER LIFE
After returning to Japan, Ishida lived in Tokyo and the Kansai region and continued to exhibit, including at the London Salon and with the Japan Photographic Society (Nihon Shashinkai). In 1925 he recommended Kagiyama as a Fellow of that Society. From the late 1930s into the 1940s he lived in northern China (Tianjin and Beijing) for his company. He returned to Masuda, was elected mayor in 1952, and died in office in 1957.
THE 2002 EXHIBITION IN TOKYO AND ITS TOUR
The story was brought back to light by the exhibition "Kiichiro Ishida and the Sydney Camera Circle", curated by Yuri Mitsuda at the Shoto Museum of Art, Shibuya, Tokyo, from 23 July to 8 September 2002. It showed about 130 of Ishida's works and about 30 works by Australian photographers. It toured to the Akita Museum of Modern Art (25 April - 1 June 2003), with loans from the Shoto Museum and the Art Gallery of NSW. A revised version then went to the Museum of Sydney (20 December 2003 - April 2004), with 65 Ishida works and 40 Circle photographs.
Catalogue: Yuri Mitsuda, Modernism/Japonism in Photography 1920's-40's: Kiichiro Ishida and Sydney Camera Circle (Tokyo: Shoto Museum of Art, 2002), 204 pp., Japanese and English. It includes short biographies of Circle members, Bostock among them.
Bostock is represented in the catalogue by five works, numbered S1 to S5:
S1 Declaration of the Sydney Camera Circle, 1916 (signed 1917). Lent by AGNSW (134.1977).
Catalogue p. 81. Shown in Tokyo, Akita and Sydney.
S2 Day breaks - cold - shrieking - bloody, 1918. Lent by AGNSW (164.1977).
S3 An Old-World Harbour, 1919-20. Not an AGNSW loan.
S4 En Passant, 1922. Not an AGNSW loan.
S5 Scherzo, c.1927. Lent by AGNSW (106.1980).
AGNSW's records list twelve works it lent to the Tokyo and Akita showings. S3 and S4 are not among them, and both date from before Ishida left Sydney. The catalogue's list of plates (pp. 187-191) records who owned each print.
BOSTOCK AND JAPANESE MOTIFS
Melissa Miles lists Bostock's advertisement for Beau Monde Hosiery in The Home Annual (1936) among the Sydney photographs of the 1920s-30s that used Japanese motifs.
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