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Cecil W. Bostock
About Cecil Bostock
Cecil Westmoreland Bostock (1884–1939) remains one of the more elusive figures in early twentieth-century Australian photography. He was born in England and came with his parents to Sydney in 1888; his father, George, a bookbinder, died in 1892.
He was first apprenticed as an engineer at the Waverley Tramway Workshop but left home around 1901 after conflicts with his mother over his wish to become an artist. Little is recorded of the following years. By 1916 he was a member of the Photographic Society of New South Wales, the Commercial Artists Association and the Sydney Camera Circle, which he helped found.
The Circle was formed on 28 November 1916 at his Phillip Street studio. Its other founders were Harold Cazneaux, Malcolm McKinnon, James Paton, James S. Stening and William Stewart White. Bostock also designed and drew up the group’s founding “Declaration.”
During the First World War he served as a gunner. His war photograph Day breaks – cold – shrieking – bloody (1918) was exhibited at the Photographic Salon in London in 1919. While in London he joined the Royal Photographic Society and showed his watercolours of war scenes at the Adelphi Gallery in 1920.
From 1920 he worked in Sydney as a professional photographer, in advertising and industrial illustration. He belonged to a new generation of commercial photographers, brought into being by demand for up-to-date images in the fast-growing field of magazine illustration. He was also a gifted designer and bookbinder.
He edited and designed the Cameragraphs catalogues for the Australian Salon exhibitions of 1924 and 1926. In 1934 he was largely responsible for the illustrations in The Book of the Anzac Memorial NSW.
In 1930 Max Dupain, then fresh from school, came to work in Bostock’s studio. There he received a thorough grounding in studio lighting, large-format cameras, and black-and-white film and processing.
Bostock’s reputation rests on a paradox. He was a Pictorialist by affiliation, but his photographs often anticipated modernism. He was a contradictory and erratic personality: his graphic work was colourful and decorative, while his photographs were austere and unmanipulated compared with those of his Pictorialist colleagues. He rarely used the soft-focus effects and painterly printing processes, such as bromoil, that were typical of the period.
Late in life he helped form the progressive Contemporary Camera Groupe and designed the catalogue for its only exhibition, held in December 1938. He died of cancer in 1939. The Art Gallery of New South Wales calls him an enigmatic personality in Australian pictorial and early modernist photography. That description still fits a photographer whose small body of work links the Pictorialist era with the modernism Dupain would bring to maturity.
Cecil Bostock's dates: birth, death and family
Cecil Bostock was the son of: George Westmoreland Bostock (1856) and Ellen Jane (1861); Birth Registered Jan-Mar 1885 in Eccleshall Bierlow, Yorks. Baptised: 21/1/1885 at St. Mary, Sheffield, Yorks
Bostock was an artist of Rushcutter's Bay, Sydney, NSW when enlisting on 14/2/1917 as Gunner in Field Artillery Brigade. He embarked from Sydney on HMAT A28 Miltiades on 2/8/1917. He was a Corporal in 10th Field Artillery Brigade AIF. He was awarded 1914/1915 Star, British War medal, and Victory medal.
In 1920, Cecil Bostock married Violet Kathleen (1887), they had one child - Joyce (1921).
Bostock died 27/12/1939 in Marrickville, NSW.
Violet died in 1973 in St. Leonard's, Sydney, NSW
The many studios of Cecil Bostock 1915 - 1939
All were in Sydney, New South Wales - based on information from Sandy Barrie's Australians Behind The Camera
| 1915 |
182 Phillip Street |
| 1917-1918 |
Army War Service, Europe |
| 1921 |
157 Phillip Street |
| 1921-1922 |
64 Elizabeth Street |
| 1922-1923 |
76 Pitt Street |
| 1926 |
84 Hunter Street |
| 1926-1927 |
82 Hunter Street |
| 1928-1932 |
154 Castlereagh Street |
| 1934-1936 |
30-32 Pitt Street |
| 1937-1939 |
231 George Street |
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