Preparation for Departure

Photographer Harold Cazneaux (Australian, 1878 - 1953)

Date1904-1927

Object number00054637

NamePhotograph

MediumGelatin silver photograph, cool tone print

DimensionsOverall: 190 × 300 mm
Display dimensions: 435 × 590 mm

ClassificationsPhotographs

Credit LineANMM Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Anne Christoffersen, in memory of the artist

Terms

DescriptionHere Harold Cazneaux depicts the large steam vessel Dorset of London loading wharfside at Wharf 19 Jones Bay, Pyrmont. The ship displays the livery of the Federal Houlder Shire line especially the Federal line which visited Austyralian ports on the UK Australi run under various owners form 1904 til it was scarapped in 1927. It is an active scene, the ship is shown preparing for departure, davits out, tended by a number of labourers on various lighters and steam vessels including the Fawn to the left of the image.HistoryHarold Cazneaux was working first as an artist-retoucher at Hammer Studio in the 1890s (He was born in 1878, was only 13 when his mother died in 1892) and had a low opinion of the formulaic studio portraiture. He was inspired to pursue art photography in the 1890s in Adelaide after seeing local work by John Kauffman and imported examples of the new impressionistic art photography movement known as Pictorial Photography. He moved to Sydney in 1904 and obtaining his own camera started taking photographs around Sydney in a Pictorial style stressing atmosphere and also nostalgia for the old Sydney world of the Rocks and local manual workers and residents. A parallel focus on Old Sydney was a feature of print makers at the turn of the century. His first one man show in 1909 included many harbour side city images often in soft focus taken early morning and after work on his way home to North Sydney and on weekend ferry excursions ot Watsons Bay and Mosman etc.. From his arrival in Sydney Cazneaux was struck by the contrasts of old and new in the ‘big smoke’ of Sydney especially the harbourside shipping but treated these as atmospheric romantic images in a style well established by late Victorian era printmakers and painters. He was commissioned to photograph BHP plants in NSW and South Australian for the Company’s 1935 Jubilee. The industrial images combined both pictorialist atmosphere with the drama and scale of modernist celebrations of the machine age. From as early as 1915 with his art -deco striped child study The Bamboo Blind, Cazneaux developed a hybrid Pictorialist –Modernist style incorporating clearer geometric lines and brighter sunshine. In his work for The Home magazine Cazneaux most often worked in a sun-lit style although still exhibiting more impressionistic works in the Pictorialist Salons. In the late 1920s and1930s his modern style was the equal of his younger contemporaries like Max Dupain but always retained a human interest element and perspective even rather than the colder machine age aesthetic and distorting angles favoured by modernists. See http://www.photo-web.com.au/ShadesofLight/11-pictorial.htm From Gael NewtonSignificanceWith its celebration of the industrial in depicting a working ship and waterfont scene, atmospheric in tone and clouded in smoke, this photograph represents the pictorialist concerns and style of Harold Cazneaux, Australia's leading photographer of the early twentieth century.