SUBLIME SOULS & SYMPHONIES:
Australian PhotoTexts 1926–1966,  Eric Riddler 1993

Introduction to this thesis |   table of contents  |   1926-1966 chronology of photo-books

Chapter 1  |   Chapter 2   |   Chapter 3  |   Chapter 4   |    Chapter 5  |   Chapter 6   |   Chapter 7  |   Chapter 8   |    Conclusion

CHAPTER THREE:  MOVEMENTS

3.1 The Views Trade

Australia was settled by the British at a time when mechanical reproduction was an ever growing means of communication. Engravings and lithographs were often made in Britain from local studies, with the aim of displaying Britain's odd new colony. It was not long before artists like Joseph Lycett were creating volumes of Australian views.

By the centenary year of 1888 there was a market in Australia and abroad for the massive projects like The Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. This was also the period when studio photographers began to lose their trade to the amateur market. The studios of photographers like Charles Kerry began to specialise in the view trade, producing postcards and folders of photographs as souvenirs of various places in Australia.

Several books have been aimed specifically at photographic work in the Nineteenth Century. Alan Davies and Peter Stanburys' The Mechanical Eye in Australia (1985) and Leigh McCawley's The Silver Image (1991) have the most comprehensive texts, coming as they do from the extensive research of the State Library of New South Wales and the University of Sydney's Macleay Museum respectively.¹

1. Alan Davies and Peter Stanbury, The Mechanical Eye in Australia, Oxford, Melbourne, 1985. Leigh McCawley, The Silver Image, Macleay Museum, Sydney, 1991.

3.2 Pictorialism

Until the birth of the Photography Gallery system in the 1970s, the exhibition of photographs was all but confined to group shows known as Salons. The majority of these Salons were organised by local camera clubs and served the clubs' immediate areas. For an Australian photographer to be exhibited as part of the World photography scene the photographer had to submit work to International Salons.

This usually required the work to be sent overseas as most attempts to hold regular International Salons in Australia were unsuccessful. Of the more successful attempts, the Australian Saions of Photography held in Sydney in 1924 and 1926 have left the best examples of that style of catalogue, Cecil Bostock's Cameragraphs.

The Cameragraphs reveal the international influence of the pictorialist movement. By the time of the Sydney Salons the pictorialist movement as an international force was being superseded by photographers experimenting with what would become modernism.

Pictorialism had its roots in the photo-mpressionist movement of the 1890s.1  The photo-impressionists believed that art was 'nature seen through a temperament', paraphrasing a quote made by Emile Zola regarding the 1866 Salon regarding the art of the young French painters now known as the Impressionists.2 Photo-impressionist photography resembled impressionist painting, using soft focus and mist to produce light play, rather than sharp detail of a scientific process.3 The assthetic rules of the photographers were more conservative than the painters, particularly the importance of landscape in their oeuvre. Intending to produce photographic works of artistic merit, the photo-impressionists separated from the conservative Royal Photographic Society and formed the Linked-Ring Brotherhood.4 This group played an important role in introducing pictoriaiism to Australian photographers. Their work was distributed here via photographic publications and there was the direct involvement of Adelaide bom photographer John Kauffmann, who lived in Britain and Europe during the early years of the Linked-Ring brotherhood.5 At the Turn of the Century, pictoriaiism was beginning to make a mark on American photography. The editor of the Camera Ciub of New York's journal Camera Notes was Alfred Steigiitz. A supporter of the new styie, his inclusion of pictorialist images in Camera Notes was unpopular with the Camera Club Authorities. Facing a withdrawal of support from the Camera Ciub, Steigiitz resigned in 1902 and formed the Photo-Secession and produced its journal, Camera Work.6  Unlike their European counterparts, the Photo-Secessionists celebrated modernity in their images, through their eschewal of the manipulative effects carried out upon photo-impressionistic photographs. It has been observed that Steiglitz's literary interest in Emile Zola was at least partly responsible for this direction.7  The resulting interest in everyday subject matter rather than ethereal landscapes had an influence upon Australian pictorialism, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne. It should be noted that the influence of the Photo-Secession on Australian photography was much smaller than that of the Linked-Ring Brotherhood, only one copy of Camera Work is known to have reached Australia at the time.8

The emergence of pictorialism in Australia gained momentum after Kauffmann's return in 1897. Important photographers of the style include Harold Cazneaux, Cecil Bostock, Fred Radford, May Moore and Minna Moore. With promotion from local journals such as Kodak's Australasian Photo-Review and the Architecturally based The Salon, the movement came to dominate Australian photography in the first part of the century. Pictorialism in Australia, sometimes known as the 'Sunshine School', grew as the movement declined elsewhere.⁹

In discussing the Australian movement, Gael Newton observes that "pictorialism as an avant-garde had finished by 1914".¹⁰ Cecil Bostock and John Kauffmann had monographs published in 1917 and 1919 respectively.¹¹ Harold Cazneaux received an important patron when Sydney Ure Smith bought his work to illustrate the magazine The Home, launched in 1920.

Cecil Bostock 1917

1. John Taylor, Pictorial Photography in Britain 1900-1920, Arts Council of Great Britain and The Royal Photographic Society, 1978, p 14.
2. ibid, p 13. This quote influenced Australian Pictorialists, as can be read in the opening paragraph in Fred Radford 'Art and Photography', 77m Salon, Sydney, Volume 1, Number 2, September-October 1912, Pp 106-110.
3. Although Zola took up photography concurrently with the rise of Photo-Impressionism, his style did not resemble that of the movement for which he ostensibly played a major role in creating. See Eric Riddler, Emile Zola- His Approach to Visual Art Through His Fiction, B.A. Thesis, University of Western Sydney, Nepean, 1989, Pp 21-28.
4. Anne Marie Willis, op cit 1.4, 5, 1988, p 132.
5. ibid, p 132.
6. William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and tlie Pftoto-Secession, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1983, p 53.
7. William Innes Homer, Alfred Stieglitz and the American Avant-Garde, Seeker & Warburg, London, 1977, Pp 15-17.
8. Gael Newton, op cit 1.4, 8, 1979, p 4.
9. Gael Newton, 1988, p 91.
10. Gael Newton, op cit 1.4, 8, 1979, p 4.
11. Cecil Bostock and Leslie Beer, op cit 2.1, 1, 1917, 1919.

 

3.3 Modernism

We do not wish to be classified as "artists" or "pictorialists" but are bent on developing the aesthetic of the light picture with reference only to natural phenomena and not to the other graphic mediums. Photography is more closely allied to Science than to Art.¹ Max Dupain, 1947.

Pictorialism was getting to be rather old hat by the beginning of the thirties. Overseas developments in photographic style and the arts in general had left the ethereality of pictorialism behind. The new photography was embracing modern life rather than clinging to a romantic landscape tradition. In Australia the phototexts were moving from Art in Australia Ltd's aesthetic souvenirs towards a more directly mercantile promotional purpose.

The first breaks with the pictorialist landscape aesthetic came around 1915. At this time, photographers working within the pictorialist style of painterly images began to take an increasing number of studies of modern urban life. This was taken up by local photographers, as can be seen by the presence of urban Australia found in the Cameragraphs of the mid 1920s. This was followed by rejection of the soft focus and falsification techniques in favour of sharp and exact focus.

While the pictorialists had kept photography and art to an imitation of French Impressionism, the avant garde in painting had changed quite significantly. During the First World War Europe had seen the arrival of the dadaist anti-art tendencies. The Berlin dadaists had used photography in their work, particularly John Heartfield. The surrealists were also emergent. Man Ray's experiments with solarisation and printing the shadows of objects placed on photographic emulsions were influential in linking photographic aesthetics with the new aesthetics of the artistic world. The German Bauhaus school would do the same for the modern design aesthetic.

Cazneaux photographs from Art In Australia June 1927

In Picturing Australia, Anne Marie Willis considers Harold Cazneaux's 1929 images for Sydney Surfing as a major breakthrough for modernism in Australian photography, especially in comparison with his work for Sydney Harbour the previous year. Sydney Harbour's pretty harbourside views, selected from the 1927 Sydney number of Art in Australia, were replaced by a clear focus, randomly composed series of modernly dressed beachgoers which were originally reproduced in The Home. As Willis notes, the selection of fashionable Bondi rather than a conservative family beach reinforces the modernity that Sydney Surfing aims for. It also reveals the general expectations of the readerships of Sydney Ure Smith's major journals, the conservative connoisseur who read Art in Australia contrasted with the thoroughly modern reader of The Home. After the Salons of the mid 1920s, Australia's next major encounter with overseas developments was the visit by E. O. Hoppe in 1930. His exhibition and, to a lesser extent, subsequent book The Fifth Continent included examples of photography of modem urban life. Another important reason for the abandonment of the soft focus approach was the arrival in Australia of the Art Deco style of architecture. The pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge and Art in Australia Limited's home, Kyle House in Macquarie Place, were early examples. When Cecil Bostock and Harold Cazneaux were commissioned to take the photographs for The Book of The ANZAC Memorial in 1934, the two Pictorially trained photographers were faced with a building unsuitable for such imagery.2 Designed by prominent Art Deco architect C. Bruce Dellit to display 'dignity and simplicity', the memorial called for defined focus and direct lighting.3  A photograph of the memorial under construction on page forty one looks up at the work in progress through the dark ring of the balcony. Art Deco was more than just an architectural phenomenon. It could be incorporated into every element of the design world. Gert Sellheim's early work for Oswald Ziegler was heavily influenced by the style. Magazine design, from main features to small advertisements, was dominated by Art Deco throughout the 1930s. The style called for a new style of photography to accompany the design. Although influenced by the austere modernist movement rather than the frivolous Art Deco, young commercial photographers were found suitable to be incorporated into the Art Deco aesthetic. The leading photographer to emerge at this time was Max Dupain. His devotion to modernism came to the attention of the photography world with Silos Morning in 1933. Within two years he had, with the patronage of Sydney Ure Smith, become a regular contributor to The Home and the subject of an article on his surrealist-influenced images in Art in Australia. Advertising and illustration continued to be the oeuvre of modernist photography throughout the 1930s. In 1940 Soul of a City became the first major book of modernist photography. Produced by Oswald Ziegler, Soul of a City incorporated Max Dupain's photographs (the first book to use Dupain's work exclusively) into a Douglas Annand designed chronological layout. The war affected the modernists in several ways. Firstly there was the rapid development of photographic technology. This would not, however, have been released to the general photographic industry until after the war and subsequent period of austerity.
	Harold Cazneaux's 1929 Sydney Surfing
	Max Dupain, Silos Morning, 1933

The involvement of photographers in the war effort, following in Frank Hurley's footsteps, saw the Modernists take on such projects as Dupain's work with William Dobell whilst camouflaging Bankstown aerodrome. Photographers had to record both the truth for the records and the deception for security. As the war drew to a close Dupain, among others, was commissioned to photograph Australia for potential immigration publicity.

One of Dupain's series of life during wartime was of working women. In the studios of the modernists, women played their role in maintaining the industry. Olive Cotton ran Max Dupain's studio while Margot Donald took over the running of the Russell Roberts commercial studios. Although obliged to step aside in peacetime, the women retained their place, if on the periphery, of professional photography.

The modernist movement, with its commercial aesthetic, can be seen as a force in Australian Photography 1947. Produced by Oswald Ziegler in 1948 following a salon coinciding with Newcastle's sesquicentenary, the selection shows how tastes had changed since the all-pictoriaiist Cameragraphs of the mid 1920s.

Despite the passage of time since the ideals of pictorialism were avant-garde, the pictorialists maintained a strong presence in Australian Photography 1947. Although the misty/grainy imagery of pictorialism remained, the photographers had adapted to modern photographic technology.

The painterly aspirations of the early days were all but abandoned. One strong interest, mainly expressed by the pictorialist but also employed by modernists, was the study of individual trees. Although following Kauffmann's ti-trees, most of the images in Australian Photography 1947 are eucalypts. The continued interest in trees was to result in a Ure Smith Miniature, AustralianTreescapes, in 1950.

John Nisbett, Australian Gums	Paul Horne, Australian Dimension	Harold Cazneaux, The Curved Gum
Julian Smith, Oscar Hammerstein II	Harold Cazneaux, A Sydney Waterside	Harold Cazneaux, Pagola Patterns

The incorporation of photographers' older works is noticeable in the pictorialists' contributions. Harold Cazneaux submitted several well-known images, including a Darling Harbour image which had appeared in the Sydney Number of Art in Australia back in 1927. Dr. Julian Smith's portraits were another important aspect of Australian pictorialism to be featured in Australian Photography 1947, although Smith himself had just died when the book was published.

As for modernism, there was a selection of both commercial and amateur work. Much of the commercial work involves industrial images and fashion photography. In the introductory essays, Max Dupain, in a piece entitled 'factual photography', decries the cringe of the pictorialists, hiding the scientific aesthetics of photography under a veil of imitative painterly techniques, as quoted at the head of this chapter.

1. Max Dupain, 'Factual Photography' in Oswald L. Ziegler's Australian Photography 1947, Ziegler-Gotham, Sydney, 1948.
2. S. Elliot Napier, Tlie Book oftlie ANZAC Memorial, Beacon Press, Sydney, 1934.
3. Dellit quoted ibid, p. 46.

3.4 Documentary

During the Depression Years of the thirties magazine imagery began to emulate the cinematic newsreels in their journalistic content. Pictorial news magazines such as Life in the United States and Picture Post in the United Kingdom emerged. With them came the birth of photo-journalism.

Photo-journalism and documentary photography are slightly different terms. Documentary photography is the broader gathering of images of contemporary life, photo-journalism is the populist aspect of documentary, concerned with the production and publication of images which have an immediate appeal and accessibility.
While photo-journalism shared modernism's basic aesthetics of clear focus and contemporary themes, it was aimed at involvement in the subject, rather than modernism's tendency towards cool detachment. Australia's pictorial journals emulated the overseas examples.¹

The first Soul of a City, 1940, was a photo-essay which, while composed in a modernist manner, owed some of its inspiration to photo-journalism. It was a deliberate record of modern life as it was at the end of the 1930s, with the Depression over but War about to begin.

Although Ure Smith's post-war Portrait series (Portrait of Sydney and Portrait of Melbourne) were not necessarily photo-journalistic, they did bear an active urban imagery. The use of the local social observers Kenneth Slessor and John Hetherington as the narrators add to the books' power as documents of the city. After success of the New York Museum of Modern Art's The Family of Man exhibition raised photo-joumalism into the 'Art Photography' stakes, the publishers of phototexts began to imitate the catalogue's style.2  The catalogue, as distributed by the Museum of Modern Art, was available in hardcover, soft cover and paperback. The catalogue featured a collage of photographs and shapes of colour. The pages of the book were arranged after the hanging pattern of the exhibition, divided into chapters which followed various aspects of the human existence around the world, accompanied by appropriate poetic quotes. The most whole-hearted imitation of the Family of Man catalogue was Melbourne, A Portrait. It bore a soft cover with a coloured pattern by Leonard French over several panoramas of the city. Its text was based on David Saunders's poetry, its approach to Melbourne was at a deliberately human scale. The final edition of Soul of a City appeared in 1962. It also took aspects of the Family of Man catalogue, notably the inclusion of poetry (this time by the poet, John Thomson) within the captions. Close in format to the first edition, Dupain's photography was once more arranged in a manner reflecting the pattern of life in Sydney. Robert Walker's work in Life at The Cross and Quinton Davis's work in Sydney, both from 1965, continue the tradition of examining Sydney as a city with a particular lifestyle.

1. For further study into the impact of photo-journalism in Australia, see Anne Marie Willis, Picturing Australia, Angus and Robertson, 1988.
2. The Family of Man catalogue by MA CO magazine for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1955.

NEXT >>> Chapter 4

Introduction to this thesis |   table of contents  |   1926-1966 chronology of photo-books

Chapter 1  |   Chapter 2   |   Chapter 3  |   Chapter 4   |    Chapter 5  |   Chapter 6   |   Chapter 7  |   Chapter 8   |    Conclusion

Based on the original thesis submitted as part of the requirement of the Masters of Arts - University of Sydney.
This is the 2021 online verson of Eric Riddler's 1993 thesis.
For this 2021 version extra images and links have been added to the text that align with photographs/topics being mentioned.