Sydney Harbour scenes : two boys on a raft
Date1905
Object number00054642
NamePhotograph
MediumSilver gelatin print or brown carbon print on paper.
DimensionsOverall: 70 × 88 mm
Display dimensions: 410 × 305 mm
ClassificationsPhotographs
Credit LineANMM Collection Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program by Anne Christoffersen, in memory of the artist
DescriptionThis small print is from Harold Cazneaux's personal collection. From 1905-1912 Cazneaux made a number of personal family folders of small pictures around his home and the Harbour. The photograph shows two young boys mucking about on the foreshore, near a wharf which is possibly at Pyrmont Bay. This delightful scene is a sensitive rendering of its subject by a pictorialist photographer experimenting with composition and mood.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 NewtonSignificanceThis small photographic print represents a typical and common Sydney Harbour scene in the early twentieth century by Australia's leading pictorialist photographer at the time, Harold Cazneaux. It represents his developing aesthetic interests which supplmented his commerical practice after he moved to Sydney from Adelaide in 1904.
