Based
on text from the original book: Shades of Light:
Photography and Australia 1839-1988
Gael Newton, 1988 Australian National Gallery
Chapter 7 Personal and Pictorial
Footnotes next chapter contents
A
professional tour in search of the picturesque
On
2 February 1886, Nicholas Caire recorded the purpose of his
visit
to Lake Tyers Mission Station in the visitors’ book
as a professional tour in search of the picturesque’(1).
Nicholas Caire (1837-1918) had been working for the
past two years as a specialist landscape photographer,
having previously
had a portrait and views studio in the Royal Arcade, Melbourne.
Originally a hairdresser, Caire had received his first
training in photography in Duryea’s studio in Adelaide
and set up his own studio there in 1867, before moving
to Bendigo
to take
advantage of the business generated by the goldfields.
Caire’s
evolution from studio portraiture to working as a roving
photographer catering to a taste for the picturesque, reflects
patterns
evident in the development of photography in these years(2).
J.W.Lindt
was also at work in 1886, in Melbourne preparing his book Picturesque New Guinea for publication in London.
In the
same years Fred Kruger (1831-1888), another German-born
photographer, living in Geelong in Victoria, published
a portfolio of original photographs titled Fine Art
Photographs of Victoria(3).
Like Caire, Kruger had first been a tradesman an upholsterer
and had changed to photography in the I860s, opening
a studio in Melbourne in 1866.
Kruger
had moved from Melbourne to the port of Geelong on the south
coast of Victoria
in 1879, and his portfolio
contained
a range of attractive scenes of the area. One of these,
Coast scene, Mordialloc Creek, near Cheltenhani, has
a foreground
enlivened by a group of ladies and gentlemen fishing.
Contemporary viewers
are struck by the similarity of the image to the classic
picnic scene on the Maine River in France taken in
1938 by renowned
documentary photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson (b.1908).
A number of Kruger’s photographs show people
deployed through the landscape with fishing poles.
A set of poles
may have been
one
of his props. A consistent aspect of these images is
the depiction of a landscape of recreation and the
attempts to place the
figures intimately within the scene.
John
Lindt’s
New Guinea work was similarly marked by the natural
and relaxed grouping of figures deep in their environment.
Nicholas Caire also made a series of genre scenes
from the
late
1870s, of characters living a life of voluntary retreat
in the bush. They show idyllic landscape views in
which a town
dweller
might relax in safety and comfort.
As
the pioneer days came to an end, the wave of pastoral expansion
declined,
sending people back into the
cities. The bush and bushmen
were romanticised in literature and the arts. The
new city dwellers no longer conducted a daily fight
for
survival but could afford
to approach the landscape as a source of recreation
and renewal of the spirit(4). Caire sought
out genuine hermits
and bushmen in
areas not far from Melbourne, or created tableaux
of his
own by placing figures picnicking, resting, reading,
and camping
in the bush.
One
picture taken in 1883 of a swagman sheltering in a burnt-out
tree(5) that may well
be posed,
acquired the
title Down on
his luck. A famous painting by Frederick McCubbin
(1885-1917)
of 1889 has a similar title and composition.
McCubbin was one of the members of a group of Impressionist
painters known as
the Heidelberg School, whose practice was to
go
into the landscape and paint direct from nature(6).
One
of Caire’s best known images is of a
fern gully at Black’s Spur in the Healesville
district. The native tree ferns of Australia
had been a popular subject for artists
for
decades, and were often presented as typical
of Australian scenery, whereas in fact such
groves were far less prolific
than stands
of eucalypts. The well-defined, graceful shape
of the fronds may have been more appealing
to settlers whose tastes had been
moulded on the forms of European trees. In
the 1880s the delight taken in fern gullies
and bush
wilderness reflected the increasingly
urban concentration of the population, who
sought relief from the cities and expressed
nostalgia
for a pioneer age(7).
Caire’s
fern gully was photographed from above to
show the shape of the ferns to their best advantage.
The light falls on the grove amid the larger
trees and close inspection reveals
a seemingly tiny man deep within the fronds.
Not surprisingly, the image acquired the
title Fairy scene. In 1887 the Sydney
photolithographic firm of Phillip-Stephan
(1887-1910) included the image under that title among a
number of Caire and Lindt
landscapes printed as large colour photolithographs. The Picturesque Atlas of Australia also
included the image redrawn by staff artist
Carl Schwarzburger (w.1850-1900s) who ‘improved’ it
by turning the man into a swagman heading
deeper into the bush followed by his faithful
dog.
He signed it as his own work(8).
Caire
did not pursue his bush subjects for purely
business reasons. He was philosophically
involved
with the promotion
of the natural
landscape as a source of health giving
recreation. He was associated with the Field Naturalists’ Club
and from 1911 to 1920 he contributed articles
and illustrations to Life and Health magazine.
Caire also promoted tourism as an extension
of his belief in the benefit
of going into the bush, and as part of
the reorientation toward this market that
the views trade as a whole was undergoing.
In 1904 he produced a Companion Guide
to Healesville with his friend Lindt,
who had actually gone to live in the bush
in
the 1890s, building a mountain-top guesthouse,
studio and retreat at Black’s Spur,
appropriately called The Hermitage(9).
Lindt,
Caire and Kruger are united in the degree
to which their views aimed to be
more picturesque
than
previous
generations
and in their ability to create images
which suggested experiences which the city dwellers
could have
in these environments.
The sophisticated deployment of figures
within the landscape made
the images more natural and believable.
These careful yet elaborate figure groupings
seen
in their work
can also
be found in Charles
Bayliss’ Darling River pictures
and the late work of Captain Sweet in
South
Australia. Sweet’s photographs
of the early 1880s have both complex
arrangements
of figures and machinery
and also a formal signature of novel
angles, diagonals and interests
in linear patterns.
A
heightened awareness of the photograph as a pictorial entity
is evident in the work of the best view photographers of the
period. As a consequence of this instinctive or conscious recognition
of the difference between reality and its photographic representation,
the personal styles, and even personalities, of many photographers
in the 1880s are more evident than during the pioneer generations.
The
format and aims of the Picturesque Atlas of Australia,
produced in parts between 1886-1888 in preparation for the
centenary
of European settlement, shows a parallel concern for the aesthetic
effect of the layout as a whole, and not just the individual
pictures, and any information they may convey about the country.
In comparison with earlier publications such as Edwin Carton
Booth’s Australia of 1873-1876, the Picturesque
Atlas was created for an increasingly sophisticated urban
society(10).
Just
as photographers were acquiring individual styles so the painters
and
graphic artists were using photographs or striving for naturalistic effects
by painting outdoors and using informal compositions(11). In the
1890s a new consciousness of making pictures emerged in the form of a self-conscious
art movement in photography known as Pictorialism. A far more
extensive use of
photography by government instrumentalities and industries including tourism,
also appeared and laid the groundwork for the advertising and illustration
photographers of the present day.
By
the 1880s about a third of the population was congregated in
the capital
cities. Despite an economic depression in the 1890s, and the long hours
and poor wages, enough free time and money remained to sustain
the growth of
tourism and outdoor recreational activities for the city dwellers. Photography
proved
to be one of the most popular and jokes and cartoons about the new breed
of zealous amateur photographers began to appear(12).
As
early as 1855 there had been calls to form a photographic society
but the first
formal society did not appear in Melbourne until 1860. Others
were formed
in the 1870s and early 1880s, but had faltered quickly or made little
impact. Between 1885 and the turn of the century, amateur societies
were formed
in most of the main cities and then in suburban and regional areas. Some
of
the earliest were the South Australian Photographic Society, and the
Queensland Photo-Association of 1885(13). A few professional
bodies concerned with
trade matters had a brief life in the 1890s but the fierce competition
and price-cutting
wars of these years discouraged collaboration between studios(14).
The
societies began to hold club competitions, then exhibitions, and finally
intercolonial exhibitions. The Northern Tasmanian Camera Club
held its
first inter-colonial show in 1894 and the Geelong Amateur Photographic
Society
organised one in 1895, which also served as a congress. This was one
of the few occasions
when photographers travelled from interstate to get together(15).
Photographic
magazines published by supply companies became available in the 1880s.
Bray and Lichtner in Sydney put out nine issues of the Australian
Photographic
Journal (A.P.J) in 1886, and Harringtons, also in Sydney, put
out a journal of the same name from 1892 which later changed title
in 1910
to the Harrington’s
Photographic Journal (H.P.J.) and lasted until 1927. An Australian
edition of the British Photographic Review of Reviews emerged
in 1894 and became the Australasian Photo-Review (A.P.R.) published by Baker and
Rouse of Melbourne until their merger with KODAK, who continued to
publish
it until 1956.
With
such enthusiasm for photography well established in the 1890s
it is not surprising that over 3000 KODAK pocket cameras
were sold
between
October
and
December of 1896 when they were first released on the Australian
market(16). Even the serious amateurs probably looked
down on the new rash of
family photographers.
Women amateurs also slowly appeared in the 1890s(17).
A
significant technical development of the period was the introduction
of silver bromide gelatin-coated papers around 1890. These papers
developed very quickly
after a short exposure to light and thus made enlarging a more
practical and commercially attractive procedure. Professional
studios seized
on the potential
of the new paper. Mark Blow in Sydney even renamed his firm the
Crown Bromide Enlargement Company in 1891. His production and
staff escalated
rapidly,
becoming a small factory by 1892 and gaining him a lead against
rival studios(18).
In
1890 Thomas Baker (1854-1928),
who had been one of the first to manufacture dry plates locally
in Australia in 1884(19), teamed with amateur photographer
J.F.C. Farquhar (w.l890s) and they opened their rooms in Elizabeth
Street, Melbourne as the Victorian Gallery of Australian
Views with an exhibition of ‘argentic
bromide’ enlarged landscape photographs. Some of these
prints were over a metre square. The Sun newspaper of 28 February
declared:
The
bromide produces real works of art, giving a soft finish to
the pictures, equal to the finest engravings. The
object
of the
firm
is to supply pictures
of national life for home decorations, at a modest price.
The
exhibition review was headed ‘Exhibition of Artistic
Photographs’.
Photographs had been described as artistic continuously
since their first appearance but a new emphasis on the
word ‘artistic’ appears
in the 1890s, pointing to changes in the way photographs
were assessed.
The
views trade in these years was undergoing a subtle evolution
and an aesthetic ‘consciousness
raising’.
The
Phillip-Stephan Company in Sydney had tried to market large
colour photolithographs in
1887 using
a selection
of some of
Caire, Lindt
and Bayliss’ best work,
even if uncredited. The size and colouring suggested
that the individual prints could be framed for the
wall as decorative items(20). Views
photographs had been framed too, but were usually
stuck in albums
and seen
as expository about the subject matter, rather than
as
fine interior decoration.
A
sensitivity to the photograph as a picture in its own right
can be seen in the
work of views photographers
in
the 1880s,
in particular
Caire, Lindt
and
Kruger, and to a degree in the work of Government
Photographer, Augustine Dyer. In addition to the
traditional topographical
role of the view
photograph, Caire
and Lindt were responding to a market arising from
an increased appreciation of the scenic beauties
of Australia. They
both had strong personal
beliefs in the spiritual experience of communion
with nature. Their efforts to
promote recreational use of the bush through their
photographic testaments and lectures
also extended to the production of tourist guides
and even the escorting of groups into the bush.
As Federation
approached
a
new national
spirit
entered their work.
Neither
Caire or Lindt had been born in Australia, but their work
well fitted a prediction
made in
1854 by English
writer
William
Howlitt (1792-1879)
about the nature of the next generation of native-born
Australians:
To
them the inverted seasons will possess no inversion. To them
the gumtree and the wattle
will assume
the place of
the oak and
the elm(21).
The
generation of painters and photographers from the I890s on
were increasingly Australian
born.
A
spirit of nationalism was also projected onto the depiction
of the landscape in the
paintings
of the
Heidelberg School
in the
1880s. Tom
Roberts (1856-1931)
was a leading figure in a movement which
placed a special value on painting direct
from nature using the example of the French
Impressionists of the 1860s
and 1870s. Experiencing the landscape directly
was almost an ideological position with
the Heidelberg School, and it is perhaps as much
due to this, as their
success in capturing specific and recognisable
qualities of the Australian light, atmosphere
and ‘feel’ of the landscape
which led to the Heidelberg School, as
Roberts, Frederick McCubbin, and Arthur
Streeton and
others became known, being regarded as
the first truly
Australian painters(22).
It
is also interesting to see how the positioning
of figures within the landscape and the
attitude of their
poses, evolved
with the
growing national
consciousness.
In 1887 Roberts painted The sunny
south in which
naked men are shown relaxing on a bushy
shoreline(23). Daintree
had suggested
such an appropriation
of
the land in his 1860s photograph of bush
travellers and Caire’s figures
are often seen sleeping, reading, relaxing
even residing as hermits in an idyllic
bushland setting. Roberts’ image
spoke for a new ‘native’ who
was white, not black, and perfectly at
ease in the landscape.
The
Heidelberg School painters were also affected by
the aestheticism of the 1880s
and 1890s
which involved
a taste
for rich decorative
interiors, Japanese
decorative arts, and a lifestyle dedicated
to beauty. When Roberts, Streeton and
others held
their 9
by 5 Exhibition of Impressions
in Buxton’s Chambers
in 1889, the rooms had been decorated
in an aesthetic manner with silks and
objets d’art(24). Some of the works
owed a debt to the tonal impressionism
of painter-etcher James McNeill
Whistler and, in contrast to the evocation
of Australian light of The sunny
south,
were patently not documents but poetic
Images.
Pictorialism
The ‘art
for art’s sake’ attitude appeared a
little later in photography than painting or the new etching revival in
printmaking(25).
In 1897
John Kauffmann (1864-1942) returned to his hometown of Adelaide after ten
years in Europe. He had gone to work in the office of English architects
Macmurdo and Horne and returned to Adelaide a convert to the new art photography
movement
in Europe.
He
joined the South Australian Photographic Society and arranged
for his work to be printed as bromide enlargements by Baker’s
Austral Company in Melbourne, and by October had submitted his work
to the Society
of Artists
in Sydney for inclusion in their next exhibition. It was not accepted,
but the Australian Star of 8 October praised Kauffmann’s
prints as ‘some
of the most perfect photographic work ever seen . . . clear and truly artistic’.
Graphic arts were, however, accepted for the first time in the Society
of Artists 1897 exhibition.(26).
Kauffmann’s
bromide enlargements were shown instead at the Baker and Rouse warehouse
in Sydney and at their office in Adelaide. The South Australian Register
of 11 February 1898 described them as ‘alluring landscape, water,
and cloud interpretations of Nature’. Both reviews had stressed
Kauffmann’s
delicate tones, as did later reviews in the APR and the APJ when
commenting on his exhibits in the 1898 annual exhibitions of the South
Australian
and New South
Wales Photographic Societies(27). The
following year Kauffmann won first prize in the landscape class of the
Photographic Society of New South
Wales Intercolonial
Exhibition, and by 1901 he was invited to judge his own society’s
annual exhibition, along with H. P. Gill (1855-1916) the Director
of the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts.
The
1901 exhibition of the South Australian Photographic Society
was considered ‘one
of the finest’ by the reviewer in the South Australian Register
of 19 October as, some of the works could be mistaken for works of
art’.
The
implied reason was the absence of ‘all the sharp
and hard lines usually associated with photography’. The response
to Kauffmann’s work confirms
that it was considerably removed from the straight naturalism of
earlier work like Baker’s and Farquhar’s and probably
Impressionistic, but not as extreme, or abstracted as the 9 by 5
Exhibition of Impressionist
painters
in 1889.
Kauffmann
was not alone in presenting photographs that were more allied
to the graphic arts and painting than the views of earlier
photographers.
FA.
Joyner
and Fred Radford, both of Adelaide, were also exhibiting works
by 1898-1899
which, while not dependent on Kauffmann’s style, showed their
awareness of the trends in Pictorial photography in Europe. Debates
over the merit of
the kind of tonal impressionism as seen in the 9 by 5 show were
also being conducted
in Adelaide, and provided a sympathetic climate for the reception
of an Impressionistic aesthetic in photography(28).
Pictorial
photography began as a specific movement in England around 1890
when George Davison (1854-1930) was awarded a silver medal
by the Royal Photographic Society for his soft-focus Impressionistic
photograph The onion field. It was
dependent on French Impressionist painters, although somewhat
sentimental by comparison to such painters’ concerns with
rigorous study of specific moments of time, space and atmosphere(29).
Davison’s
work was not as impressive as that of P. H. Emerson who had
used selective focus in his photographs, not with the aim of
making
them look like Impressionism, but from a belief that overall
sharp focus of the camera was not
true to natural vision. Emerson produced a dazzling body of
work through the publication of his photographically illustrated
book, Life and Landscape on the
Norfolk Broads of 1886. In his book Naturalistic Photography
of 1889, Emerson articulated a theory that photography
was an independent art form with its own
aesthetic basis in truth to the subject, and ‘natural’ impressionistic
vision'. By 1890 he had recanted in his tract Death of
Naturalistic Photography saying photography could never
be controlled enough to be an art(30). Few
of Emerson’s
photographic publications reached Australia although later
Pictorialists borrowed his imagery. The complexity of his theories
discouraged
comment and debate
in Australia, although the photographic magazines advertised
his texts and made
some references to them(31).
In
1892, George Davison was at the centre of a controversy between
the administrators of the Royal Photographic Society
and the
more art-minded of its members,
which led to the formation of a breakaway group who called
themselves The Linked Ring
Brotherhood, and set up the London Photographic Salon in
1893. Membership of The Links was by invitation only. Their aim
was
to demonstrate,
by
example, the
pictorial application of photography as a means of expression
indistinguishable from the other arts. In this attitude The
Links also reflected
the revival of printmaking as an independent and equal art
form, which
had encouraged
the new
etcher circles in Australia and the opening up of the Society
of Artists 1897 exhibition to the graphic arts.
They
saw The Royal Photographic Society as overly concerned with ‘minutiae
of the science of optics’. The Links concentrated
attention on the final print not the ‘negative sketch’.
The latter had to show ‘evidence
of personal artistic feeling and execution(32).
A
similar disparagement of the minutiae of the negative
sketch appeared in the December 1890 issue of the Australian
Critic.
In an article
on ‘The Hand
Camera in Photography’, the author recommended
amateurs re-examine their seemingly hopeless negatives
for the presence
of broad effects 'which showed
life and action rather than the rest and almost death’ of
the perfect sharp picture(33).
Australian
photographers were kept up to date on the debates over
photographic aesthetics in Europe by the photographic
magazines including the Photograms of the Year,
which reviewed the
annual London exhibitions at the Royal
and the London Salon in the 1890s. The Australian edition
of the Photographic Review of Reviews of November
1894 included an extract from a speech by founder
member H. P. Robinson to the London Photographic Salon,
in which he said that ‘exclusive
devotion to science is a chief cause of want of success
in picture-making(34).
Henry
Robinson (1830-1901) was a painter by training
and an enthusiastic convert to photography in the
I85Os known for his skilful and ambitious narrative
pictures made by combining many negatives. He was
also an influential theorist and campaigner for photography
as an art, having published various books, including Pictorial Effect in Photography in 1869 and Picture-Making
by Photography in
1884, as guides to how to make photographs look like
art by the choice of storytelling subjects and control
of the final image by printing techniques. Robinson’s
dogmatic rules of composition were far removed from
Emerson’s vision
of a separate naturalistic photographic aesthetic(35).
The
split between bohemian and bourgeoisie, poetry
and prose, art and science was not limited to followers
of
aestheticism
or Pictorial
photography.
Profound changes were occurring in the division
of labour into specific vocations,
with separate training programmes and philosophies.
The Australian Association for
the Advancement of Science was formed in 1888,
and marks the close of the
era of Natural Philosophy in which study of the
natural world as a microcosm led
to universal theories. The gentleman-amateur scientist
of earlier years was increasingly replaced by the
new and specialised
professional anthropologist,
geologist or
scientist. The new specialist ‘art’ photographers
distinguished themselves both from the ordinary
amateur or the crass professional concerned
only with
money(36).
In
response to local and overseas support for impressionism,
Australian photographers who had had their eyes
opened to the new ‘beauty’ also opened
up their lenses and Pictorialism spread quickly,
in the way previously reserved
for technological advances.
With
Kauffmann’s
elevation to judge of the 1901 South Australian
Photographic Society’s annual exhibition
it can be assumed that the new art photographers
had moved from the peripheries of the amateur
societies to the centre, as The Links had done
in England. This trend was viewed with some
concern by A. Hill
Griffiths, Australian correspondent to the Photograms
of the Year, who wrote that, ‘I
deem it an unpardonable error to depict Australian
scenes
with uncharacteristic English mists(37).
The
South Australian Photographic Society was
particularly active in the early advances of
Pictorialism. By
1898 F.A. Joyner (1863-1945), an Adelaide-born
solicitor(38) with
many cultural and scientific interests, had
his figure subject Dawn accepted
at the Philadelphia Salon. By the turn of
the century he was
using soft-focus and misty atmosphere in
his landscapes. Later in 1905 he made extended
narratives illustrating rhymes such as Jack
and Jill. Kauffmann avoided such genre narratives
so that although his work may have stimulated
the South Australian
Society into favouring Pictorialism, Joyner
was drawing on earlier Pre-Raphaelite paintings
and Pictorialism as favoured by H. P. Robinson
rather than Kauffmann
for his inspiration. Joyner and many of the
amateurs were following on genre traditions
established in the 1880s, in particular by
Caire and others, with
their storytelling photographs(39).
Fred
T. Radford (w. c.1898-1920) was possibly
inspired by Kauffmann but adopted a more
extreme soft-focus which can be seen in
his An impressionist
photo illustrated in The Photograms
of the Year of 1899. In the same year
Radford contributed an article, ‘Impressionist
Photography’ to
the APR. in which he argued for
the greater truth of soft-focus in representing
nature,
than ‘the present methods of small
stops and needle sharpness; something must
be left to the imagination as well as a
general softening of all
lines’. He allied with ‘workers
who aim at something higher than “you
press the button, we do the rest”(40).
Radford’s
support for Impressionism in photography
paralleled the public debate in Adelaide
over the controversial purchase of Sydney
Long’s painting The valley for the Art Gallery
of South Australia. This work was actually
less
extreme formally than some of the 9 by
5 works of 1889 but the South Australian
Register defended the purchase in an
editorial on 28 November 1898. As well
as educating the public to the truth
of
the new vision, the Impressionist style
could:
impart
the hint that much pleasure can be derived from the habit of
retaining
in the
mind the
impression conveyed
when
the beauties
of
a scene first
burst upon the gaze, and before the ‘poetry
of the indefinite’ has been
dispelled by the prose of a matter-of-fact
scrutiny of detail.
By
1891 Radford had established himself as a professional
in Adelaide, presumably
one
of the
earliest Pictorial
photographers to bring
the new style to commercial
work. Around 1903 he travelled to
England and America where he worked for some
years, returning
to Adelaide
around
1909 to work
from the
Fruhling studio. By this time he
was using the range of printing processes
which
gave the
Pictorialists
the means to idealise and romanticise
their images by suppression of detail
and
control of tone. Radford worked in
carbon and platinum and had a number
of his
gum-bichromate
portraits
included in
The
Royal
Photographic
Society’s annual
exhibitions. No examples of his work
have been located. As Kauffmann never
provided written accounts of his
philosophy, Radford’s energetic
promotion of photo-impressionism
is the earliest
direct exposition of Australian Pictorialists’ aims
and aspirations(41).
The
South Australian Photographic Society’s
1901 exhibition had been intercolonial.
In the following two years they
also held international exhibitions.
A
few minor English Pictorialists,
David Blount and Harold Hill, comprised
the ‘international’ content
and Blount’s gum-bichromate
portrait The daughter of Eve was
awarded the gold medal(42). The
Society’s
1903 exhibition included a few
more entries from overseas, a print
by
H. P. Robinson and one by A. Horsley-Hinton
(1863-1908).
The latter’s landscapes remained
popular with Australians for several
decades.
In
December 1903 the New South Wales Photographic Society
took
over the
lead in Pictorialism
from the South Australians,
with
their own
large
international salon. A number
of gum-bichromates by American photo-secessionist
Edward
Steichen were shown in the noncompetitive
section. Over fifty years later
Steichen would
send The Family of Man exhibition
to Australia. It was another
international exhibition,
but committed to a
different aesthetic;
the documentary
photograph.
Sydney
Long reviewed the 500 or so exhibits in the
New South
Wales
Photographic
Society’s 1903 show,
mentioning Kauffmann’s
strong point as ‘the
rendering of sil-very light
on masses of water'(43).
Long
also liked Steichen’s
portrait work which he felt
was ‘too good
to become popular with the
public as it was not excessively
retouched'. The rest of Steichen’s
work struck him as experiments
in imitating some other mediums,
finding his Judgment
of Paris ‘a
very far fetched piece of
symbolism’.
Perhaps Long was experimenting
with photography at this
time, as were other artists,
such
as Norman Lindsay (1879-1969)
and his brother Lionel (1874-1961).
The latter was most active
around 1911 when he made
bromoils and autochromes(44).
Norman
Lindsay’s self portrait
photograph of c.1903 is
typical of the style of
portraiture
in the arts of the day
with emphasis on lighting
to create
mood
and characterisation. Steichen’s
work in the 1903 exhibition
would have been similar,
although more exaggerated
being in the painterly
gum-process. Extreme soft-focus
works,
from members of the main
eastern societies, were
present at
the 1903 exhibition prompting
the APR. editor
to comment:
We
notice many of our old friends from
the fuzzy-wuzzy
school,
baffling the
vision and
confusing the
brain of onlookers(45).