Harold Cazneaux

Australian, 1878 - 1953

BiographyHarold Cazneaux (1878-1953), born in New Zealand to photographer parents, began his photographic career in the commercial studio system in Adelaide as an artist-retoucher at Hammer Studio around the turn of the 19th century. Very quickly he embraced the pictorialist movement, inspired after seeing local work by John Kauffman and imported examples of the new impressionistic art photography movement. He became an outspoken advocate of the genre of photography as an art form. He saw it as a companion to impressionism, a painterly style and atmosphere that he sought from photography, romanticising the working world and industry. At times he juxtaposed the old, the tradiitonal with the new and then in the 1920s and 30s explored modernist form, composition and subject. Ships, wharves and Harbour life were suitable subjects for him to explore both genres, while he operated his commercial practice taking portraits, commissions and publishing work in Sydney Ure Smith's publications.

After he moved to Sydney from Adelaide in 1904 Cazneaux worked as a commercial photographer for Freeman Studios as an artist-retoucher and then as chief camera operator on portraiture work. He developed a low opinion of formulaic studio traditions and practices.

Cazneaux explored his new home along with the idea of pictorialism, the picturesque and the notion of the artist-photographer. He acquired his own camera and took this Midge Box camera into the streets of Sydney and the nooks and crannies of the harbour, where he found the perfect subjects for experimentation with light, mood, painterliness and the juxtaposition of the old and the new.

He held his first solo exhibition at the rooms of the Photographic Society of New South Wales in 1909. It 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 to Watsons Bay and Mosman. Cazneaux was struck by the contrasts of old and new in the ‘big smoke’ of Sydney especially the harbourside and shipping but treated these as atmospheric romantic images in a style well established by late Victorian era printmakers and painters.

Through regular exhibition of his works in Photographic Society programs he formed a connection with Sydney Ure Smith who became a patron in future years, publishing Cazneaux images in his various magazines and booklets, especially the Home.

He began to absorb some of the interests of the younger modernist photographers in dramatic form, light and geometric composition. 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 and 1930s 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.

Harold Cazneaux made trips up and down the NSW coast and to the interior on photographic excursions and commissions. In 1935 and 1937 he made two trips to South Australia where he probably travelled along the Murray River, and then along the coast in his Buick car taking photographs. 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. He died in 1953.

See http://www.photo-web.com.au/ShadesofLight/11-pictorial.htm

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