Harold Cazneaux

Harold Cazneaux (30 March 1878 - 19 June 1953) was Australia’s greatest pictorialist photographer; a pioneer whose style had an indelible impact on the development of Australian photographic history. As a regular participator in national and international exhibitions, Cazneaux was unfaltering in his desire to contribute to the discussion about the photography of his times. He created some of the most memorable images of the early twentieth century.

Harold Pierce Cazneau (he added an "x" to his surname in 1904 to acknowledge his Huguenot ancestry) was born in Wellington, New Zealand to Australian parents who returned home after some years.

For many years Cazneaux’s prints were exhibited in shows organised by the London Salon of Photography (1911 to 1952) and later included in the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain’s annual salons. In 1914 he won Kodak's "Happy Moment" competition, and the £100 prize money went to a depost for his future home. In 1921 he was elected a member of the London Salon and in 1937 he was the first Australian to be conferred an Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society. Beyond his photographic oeuvre, Cazneaux was also a prolific writer. As a correspondent for Photograms of the Year (UK) for more than twenty years he was the international voice of Australian photography. He was official photographer for Sydney Ure Smith’s lifestyle magazine The Home from 1920 to 1941. And he was commissioned to produce images for a number of Ure Smith’s publications including Sydney Surfing (1929), The Bridge Book (1930), The Sydney Book (1931) and The Australian Native Bear Book (1932).

The use of light was a defining characteristic of Cazneaux’s later work and in 1916 he and others formed the Sydney Camera Circle, establishing the so-called ‘Sunshine School’ of photography. The Circle was created for a number of important reasons: it embraced the particularities of Australian light and landscape, and was a move away from the English-inspired darker imagery dominating photographic practice at that time.

Cazneaux's work was championed for decades by the editor of "The Home" magazine, Sydney Ure Smith.

The National Library of Australia is the home of the principal archive of Cazneaux prints and negatives, thanks to the generosity of the Cazneaux family. The Art Gallery of New South Wales also has a finest collection of Cazneaux’s work in Australia, and was also the first Australian museum to hold a major exhibition of his work in 1975.

The exhibition "Harold Cazneaux: artist in photography" at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in June and July 2008 includes more than 100 of his iconic images exploring the breadth and depth of his work such as landscape, portraits, artists’ portraits, the harbour and the city.

An exhibition of his photographs, called "Thoroughly modern Sydney: 1920s and 30s glamour and style" was held at the Museum of Sydney, in Sydney in August-October 2006. It was assembled largely from images he took for the Australian magazine "Home", though it also included new prints from previously unpublished negatives. The subject ranged across "all that was fashionable and new" at that time, covering architecture, art and interior design, and also including many portraits of Australians then active in those fields.

He married Winifred, and had five daughters (one of whom was named Rainbow) and a son, Harold, who died aged 21 at Tobruk in 1941.

ources

* Robert McFarlane, "Leading light", Good Weekend magazine, 21 May 2008

External links

* [http://www.nla.gov.au/exhibitions/caz/biog.html Cazneaux biography] on National Library of Australia website
* [http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-an7831529 Largest collection of Harold Cazneaux photographs in world held in Pictures Branch at National Library of Australia, Canberra]