AUSTRALIAN ART & PHOTOGRAPHY

Harold Pierce Cazneaux, commonly referred to as H. P. Cazneaux, was an Australian photographer; a pioneer whose style had an indelible impact on Australian photographic history. In 1916, he was a founding member of the pictorialist Sydney Camera Circle.

First Edition.

• xvi,88p. : all ill. ; 31cm. #100624 (Bookplate on fpd.)
• Cazneaux, Harold, 1878-1953
• Australian photography, 1906-1947. Cazneaux, Harold, 1878-1953. Illustrations
• Photography, Artistic
• Harold Cazneaux’s portraits of influential Sydneysiders for the style-bibles of the day eschewed the romantic for the naturalistic.

  In his forty-year career as a photographer, Harold Cazneaux created a rich catalogue of Sydney’s mood and people. Cazneaux’s iconic cityscapes and street scenes have come to define the Sydney of his time and his many portraits offer a glimpse into the small social world which linked the city’s primary tastemakers in the 1920s and 1930s.

• Harold Cazneaux (1878-1953) arrived in Sydney in 1904 and worked for the commercial studio Freeman & Co. while with his own work established a strong profile in photographic circles for images of the city’s streets, people and daily life. He was a founding member in 1916 of the Sydney Camera Circle, a group which endorsed photography as an art form akin to painting, and which also promoted the development of a form of pictorial photography with a distinctly Australian character through use of local qualities of sunlight and shadow. By 1920, Cazneaux had set up his own studio at his home at Roseville, and was engaged by influential publisher and artist Sydney Ure Smith as the official photographer for Smith’s stable of style-bible magazines which included The Home and Art in Australia. The work for Smith called for a diverse output, including numerous portraits of Sydney identities and their lifestyles. While he later admitted that photographs of Sydney socialites were his most disliked assignments, Cazneaux enjoyed photographing members of the creative circles he moved in. Artists like Norman Lindsay, Rayner Hoff, and Thea Proctor were photographed by Cazneaux, as were others within the cluster of arbiters of art and style who enjoyed Ure Smith’s regular patronage.