Rediscovering the romance of a black and white Sydney through the lens of Pictorialist photographer Harold Cazneaux

A DIRECT family link to Sydney’s days of gaslight and steam will be made when vintage prints are offered for sale by descendants of photographer Harold Cazneaux

Hyde Park Before 1920, by Harold Cazneaux. For History page. Elizabeth Fortescue. Supplied

A DIRECT family link to Sydney’s days of gaslight and steam will be made when vintage prints are offered for sale by descendants of photographer Harold Cazneaux.

One of Sydney’s most elegiac photographic poets, Cazneaux adored the zigzag back streets of The Rocks, the clean lines of Martin Place in raking light, rainy pathways through Hyde Park and the battered hulks that berthed in Darling Harbour.

Cazneaux’s superb black and white photographs of all these things, and much more, are part of the collective pictorial memory of an old-time Sydney that has passed from view.

An exhibition called Rediscovering Harold Cazneaux will offer a selection of these original photographs for exhibition and sale by three of Cazneaux’s granddaughters who inherited the prints from their mothers — Cazneaux’s daughters Rainbow, Jean and Carmen. Cazneaux had another two daughters, Beryl and Joan, and a son Harold, who died in Tobruk in WWII.

Flag Shadows, 1914, Cazneaux’s daughters Rainbow, Beryl and Jean Cazneaux, in North Sydney.

Rediscovering Harold Cazneaux opens on April 30 at Badger & Fox Gallery in Surry Hills, as part of the Head On Photo Festival, and is curated by Gael Newton. Newton mounted her first Cazneaux retrospective in 1975 at the Art Gallery of NSW.

“All the pre WWII Pictorialist photographers had been largely forgotten in favour of the moderns like Max Dupain,” Newton says.

Pictorialists were those photographers who sought to bring a painterly, romantic quality to their images. Cazneaux had fallen in love with Pictorialism in 1898 when he saw the work of John Kauffmann and others at a South Australian Photographic Society exhibition.

Newton says Cazneaux “dropped off the map” again after another retrospective at the AGNSW in 2008.

“So I have been trying to bring him back into focus a bit more,” she says.

Hyde Park before 1920, by Harold Cazneaux.

Cazneaux was born in 1878 in Wellington, New Zealand, where his parents were both photographers. The family moved to Adelaide in about 1886 where Cazneaux’s father worked as a camera operator at a studio called Hammer and Co. The young Cazneaux began working there, too, as an artist/retoucher. But in 1904 he moved to Sydney to take up a better job with Freeman photographic studio in George St. Soon after, he bought his first camera. Living in North Sydney with his bride Winnie, Cazneaux would take pictures on his way to and from work.

By 1909 his reputation was already such that the Photographic Society of NSW organised an exhibition of his photographs. Two years later he began exhibiting with the London Salon of Photography. He would win 38 prizes, most of them international. He would also be made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.

Old hulk, Darling Harbour, 1921, by Harold Cazneaux.

In 1914, thanks to winning a Kodak prize, Cazneaux was able to put a deposit on a home in Dudley Ave, Roseville, where his large family made full use of the beautiful garden he cultivated behind the house. In 1916 Cazneaux became a founding member of the Sydney Camera Circle, whose manifesto was to bring “truly Australian sunshine effects” to international Pictorialism.

But hard times were coming. Disillusioned and oppressed by his work at Freeman Studio, Cazneaux suffered a nervous breakdown and left his job.

The old-style portrait studios used “fake and phoney atmospheres, old cameras, headrests and stuffed animals for the kids”, photographer Max Dupain later wrote.

“What a ghastly and depressing environment for Caz’s creative soul. It drove him to a physical and nervous collapse.”

The clock at a quarter to six, 1910, Post Office, Life Mutual, Martin Place and George St, by Harold Cazneaux.

In 1920, publisher and artist Sydney Ure Smith offered Cazneaux a job as head photographer of The Home magazine — a journal which promoted the work of many leading artists of the day. Eight years later, Cazneaux was able to pay off his debts.

The year 1937 produced two iconic photographs in Australia — Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, and Cazneaux’s The Spirit of Endurance. Cazneaux’s picture showed a gum tree in the desert. By the 1930s Cazneaux wrote that “many of the old city habits and customs have vanished in the passing of the old city characters”.

But he was still philosophical: “Whatever pictures are made of our great Sydney today will in future years have some historical interest and value. As time marches on there will always be a ‘Sydney of Yesterday’.”

Originally published as Rediscovering the romance of a black and white Sydney through the lens of Pictorialist photographer Harold Cazneaux