1-20 of 50 Results  for:

  • Oceanic/Australian Art x
  • Photography x
Clear all

Article

Aberhart, Laurence  

Kyla Mackenzie

(b Nelson, 1949).

New Zealand photographer. Aberhart became a leading photographer in New Zealand from the 1970s with his distinctive 8×10 inch black-and-white photographs, taken with a 19th-century large format Field Camera. He is particularly well known for his images of disappearing cultural history, often melancholic in tone, in New Zealand.

Aberhart’s use of an ‘outmoded’ process for picturing subjects in apparent decay or decline paradoxically re-invigorated them. He was inspired by the documenting traditions of New Zealand’s itinerant 19th-century photographers. His generally provincial subjects included vacant architectural interiors and exteriors, such as domestic houses, Masonic lodges, churches, Maori meeting-houses, and cemeteries, war memorials, museum exhibits, landscapes, and horizons (see A Distant View of Taranaki, 14 February 2009, Auckland, A.G.). Aberhart also produced several compelling portraits, especially those from the late 1970s and early 1980s of his daughters (e.g. Kamala and Charlotte in the Grounds of the Lodge, Tawera, Oxford, 1981; Christchurch, NZ, A.G.)....

Article

Bayliss, Charles  

Robert Smith

(b Hadleigh, nr Ipswich, Suffolk, 1850; d Sydney, June 4, 1897).

Australian photographer. He arrived in Melbourne in 1854, where at the age of 16 he became assistant to Henry Beaufoy Merlin (1830–73), photographing views throughout the colony of Victoria, usually of buildings, often with the occupants posed before their façades. After five years they moved to Sydney, then to the goldfields of New South Wales, still concentrating on view pictures. Bayliss specialized in panoramas, and after Merlin’s death, the latter’s erstwhile patron, Bernard Holtermann (1838–85), commissioned him to make a photographic record of Australia. He began with an exhaustive study of Sydney (see fig.), followed by extended travel in Victoria, working with large wet-plate negatives, and producing numerous large composite panoramas. Holtermann’s home incorporated a tower 22 m high overlooking Sydney and its harbour, and Bayliss converted its upper level into a gigantic camera with which he made telephoto views, some on 900×1600...

Article

Binns, Vivienne  

Anne Kirker

(b Wyong, NSW, Dec 6, 1940).

Australian painter, photographer and teacher. Binns trained as a painter at the National Art School, Sydney (1958–62) and held her first solo exhibition at Watters Gallery, Sydney in 1967. It comprised vividly coloured and decorative paintings, with explicit representations of female genitalia. This symbolic imagery predated a collective push by Australian women artists to produce work that they believed was inherently female. She initiated many community arts projects from the beginning of the 1970s and was an influential force in re-positioning women’s work. This took into account collaborative projects and a respect for amateur techniques and traditions that thrive outside the art world of metropolitan centres. Her community projects included Mothers’ Memories, Others’ Memories for Blacktown Municipality (1979–81) and the art workshop program Full Flight, which Binns conducted for women throughout rural New South Wales (1981–3). Her Tower of Babel, an ongoing work open to contributors by invitation, was initiated in Sydney in ...

Article

Brake, Brian  

William Main

(b Wellington, June 27, 1927; d 1988).

New Zealand photographer and film maker. He came to photography through membership of the Christchurch Camera Club. Moving to Wellington in 1945 he became an assistant to Spencer Digby, one of the country’s leading portrait photographers. After five years he moved as a cameraman and director to the government-sponsored National Film Unit, where one of his notable achievements was the Snows of Aorangi, on which he collaborated with John Drawbridge and the composer Douglas Lilburn. Although this film proved popular at the time, its worth was not properly recognized by the controllers of the Film Unit, and Brake therefore moved to London where he freelanced as a photojournalist. From 1955 to 1966 he worked for the international agency Magnum in Paris and New York. He also worked for the Rapho agency, undertaking assignments for Life Magazine, National Geographic, Horizon and Paris-Match. Independent of the agencies, he collaborated with the New Zealand author ...

Article

Bruehl, Anton  

Constance W. Glenn

(b Hawker, Port Augusta, S. Australia, March 11, 1900; d San Francisco, CA, Aug 10, 1983).

American photographer of Australian birth. Bruehl trained as an electrical engineer in Melbourne, but in 1919 he emigrated to the USA. He developed his interest in photography while working for the Western Electric Company, New York. In 1923 he attended an exhibition by students of Clarence H(udson) White, who was then considered America’s most prominent Pictorialist photographer. White agreed to teach him privately, but by 1924 Bruehl had become both a regular student at White’s New York school and a member of his summer faculty in Canaan, CT. White encouraged the individualism shown by his students. Among them, Bruehl, Paul Outerbridge and Ralph Steiner became known for a crisp, graphic style that would distinguish the best commercial photography in the 1920s and 1930s.

In 1927 Bruehl opened his own studio, which prospered in New York until 1966. The photograph Untitled (Riverside, U. CA, Mus. Phot., see 1985 exh. cat., no. 20) of an apple, camera and lamp exemplifies his use of high contrast with black background and is an example of the table-top still-lifes that appeared in such magazines as ...

Article

Burton, Alfred  

William Main

(Henry)

(b England, 1834; d Dunedin, 1914).

New Zealand photographer. At the age of 34 he travelled to join his younger brother, Walter Burton, who had established a photographic business in Dunedin, New Zealand. Under the name of Burton Bros. they practised photography together until their partnership was dissolved by mutual consent in 1876. Alfred continued to trade under the firm’s name until 1898, at which point he sold his remaining interests to two former associates, Muir and Moodie. A great deal of anecdotal information about his life can be found in the self-promoting articles that he supplied to various Dunedin newspapers and publications. He is remembered above all for his trip up the Wanganui River in April and May in 1885. This North Island river gave access to the hinterland known as the King Country, a place where Maori tribes had retreated after the New Zealand Wars of the 1860s. Photographing as he went, Burton documented the villages and people of the area in 250 plates. These images are among the most important social documents on Maori life to have survived from this period. Burton marketed his views in albums, which he called ...

Article

Buvelot, Abram-Louis  

Jocelyn Fraillon Gray

(b Morges, Vaud, Mar 3, 1814; d Melbourne, Victoria, May 30, 1888).

Swiss painter, lithographer, and photographer, active in Brazil and Australia. He attended a drawing school in Lausanne, where his teacher may have been Marc-Louis Arlaud (1772–1845), and is thought to have spent some time with the landscape painter Camille Flers in Paris c. 1836 en route to Bahia (Salvador), Brazil. In 1840 he moved to Rio de Janeiro, where he established himself as a painter of local views and exhibited with the Academia Imperial das Belas Artes, Rio. His Brazilian landscapes, of which the View of Gamboa (1852; Rio de Janeiro, Mus. N. B.A.) is an example, received critical acclaim for their vivacious lighting. As a photographer he fulfilled commissions in daguerreotype for Emperor Peter II, and with the figure painter Auguste Moreau he produced a set of eighteen lithographs, Picturesque Rio de Janeiro, published in 1843–1844. From 1852 to 1864 he worked as a portrait photographer in Switzerland and from ...

Article

Caire, Nicholas  

Robert Smith

(John)

(b Guernsey, Channel Islands, Feb 28, 1837; d Melbourne, Feb 13, 1918).

Australian photographer of Guernsey birth. After his arrival in South Australia c. 1858, he pursued his interest in photography while working as a hairdresser, becoming a professional photographer in Adelaide in 1867. Economic recession led him to move in 1870 to the neighbouring colony of Victoria, where he worked as hairdresser and photographer in the goldfields settlement of Talbot. By 1871 he was able to open a studio in the larger town of Bendigo, achieving commercial success with carte-de-visite portraits and local views. He had an interest in art, having tried his hand at painting, and became a precursor of Pictorial photography, converting the formally posed group portrait into the conversation piece and producing landscape scenes with human interest genre subjects and picturesque effects to meet a growing nationalistic demand.

To take advantage of his increasing success Caire moved to Melbourne in 1876 to exploit its rapid urban growth as subject-matter, and to use it as a base for forays into the countryside, seeking novel or spectacular subjects. Expansion of the railway system and his adoption of the dry plate process gave him greater mobility, and he was able to photograph increasingly remote localities, culminating in an expedition to Mt Buffalo, in ...

Article

Cazneaux [Cazneau], Harold  

Robert Smith

(Pierce)

(b Wellington, New Zealand, March 30, 1878; d Sydney, June 19, 1953).

Australian photographer of New Zealand birth (see fig.). His father, Pierce Mott Cazneau (1849–1928), was an English-born New Zealand photographer, who became manager of a photographic portraiture studio in Adelaide c. 1889 and took his family to South Australia. While still at school Harold Cazneaux assisted his father and in 1897 joined the same studio as an artist-retoucher. He was mainly interested in becoming an artist and attended evening classes conducted by Harry P. Gill. Acquaintance with the influence of the English Pictorial photography movement in the 1890s made him aware of the medium’s artistic potential. Dissatisfied with his routine occupation in Adelaide, c. 1904 he joined a studio in Sydney where the work was similar, but a higher salary enabled him to buy his own camera and begin creative photography on his own account, including a lasting preoccupation with pictorial celebration of the diversity of everyday life in the city....

Article

Culbert, Bill  

Edward Hanfling

[William] (Franklin)

(b Port Chalmers, Jan 23, 1935).

New Zealand photographer, sculptor, installation artist, and painter, active also in France and Great Britain. Culbert consistently explored the workings of both natural and artificial light in his works, as well as the transformation of found objects and materials. A student at Hutt Valley High School, his artistic ability was fostered by the radical art educator James Coe. From 1953 to 1956, Culbert studied at the Canterbury University College School of Art in Christchurch. Moving to London in 1957 to attend the Royal College of Art, he became interested in the photographic works of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, while his paintings were informed by Cubism. In 1961 Culbert moved to Croagnes in Provence, France; he remained in France and the UK for the rest of his career.

During 1967–8, Culbert shifted his focus from the analysis of form and light in painting to the analysis of actual light, often arranging light bulbs in grid formations. In ...

Article

Daintree, Richard  

Robert Smith

(b Hemingford Abbots, Hunts [now Cambs], Dec 13, 1832; d Beckenham, Kent, June 20, 1878).

Australian photographer and geologist of English birth. In 1852 he withdrew from studies at Christ’s College, Cambridge (1851–2) for health reasons, joined the Australian gold-rush, and spent two unproductive years prospecting in Victoria. The experience inspired an interest in geology, and in 1854 he joined the Victorian mineralogical survey as an assistant surveyor. During six months’ stay in London in 1856 and 1857 to study assaying at the Royal School of Mines, he became interested in photography. On his return to Victoria in 1858 he collaborated with Antoine Julien Fauchery (1823–61) in producing Sun Pictures of Victoria, a series of photographs illustrating various aspects of the life and scenery of the colony. Having rejoined the newly named Victorian Geological Survey (1859), in 1860 he began regularly using photography as a substitute for hand-drawn diagrams, and as a topographical record. With government financial support he produced photographs publicizing the colony for the International Exhibition in London of ...

Article

Dowling, Julie  

Jeanette Hoorn

(b Perth, Jan 31, 1969).

Australian Aboriginal painter and photographer of Badimaya and Yamatji descent. Convent educated, she trained at Curtin University and at the Claremont School of Art, both in Perth, between 1992–5. Dowling gained broad recognition from the late 1990s with her confronting and haunting paintings that tell stories about her family and the history of British colonialism and race relations in Western Australia (see fig.). Rather than working in a traditional indigenous vocabulary, Dowling paints in a global style, incorporating a remarkable range of traditions. These include social realism, icon painting, Pop art and Surrealism, as well as Australian indigenous art. She combines these styles in a unique way in paintings that range from miniature icons to large studio portraits. Her style is ‘painterly’ and Post-modern, her imagery decidedly political.

Photographs from her childhood spent in suburban Perth are the basis for some of her group portraits. These family snaps act as an aide-mémoire in her paintings and her work is influenced by and contributes to the international debate that the French historian Pierre Nora’s work has engendered around history and memory. Her ...

Article

Drysdale, Sir Russell  

Patrick McCaughey

(b Bognor Regis, Feb 7, 1912; d Sydney, June 29, 1981).

Australian painter and photographer of English birth. His family settled in Melbourne in 1923, but Drysdale visited Europe twice in the early 1930s; on his second visit in 1932–3 he was particularly excited by the work of Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. The experience confirmed his desire to be an artist.

After returning to Melbourne, Drysdale studied for two years with George Bell, who ran the only school devoted to the teaching of modern art. In May 1938 Drysdale returned to Europe to continue his studies with Iain McNab (1890–1967) at the Grosvenor School of Art in London and then with Othon Friesz at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Such works as the Rabbiter and his Family (1938; R. G. Casey priv. col., see Dutton, p. 23) demonstrate his early interest in Australian rural life.

Drysdale returned to Australia in ...

Article

Dunkley-Smith, John  

John R. Neeson

(b Ballarat, Victoria, 1946).

Australian photographer, film maker, painter, and installation artist. Dunkley-Smith studied at Ballarat Teacher’s College (1964–5), Melbourne Teacher’s College (1966), Ballarat School of Mines and Industries (1967–71), and at Hornsey College of Art, London (1974–6). Since the late 1970s, Dunkley-Smith has made an enduring foundational contribution to analogue and digital, time-based, and venue-specific installation practice in Australia. Initially trained as a painter, Dunkley-Smith’s work with film and multiple slide projection installations date from the mid-1970s when he was living in London. His installations are characterized by duplicate and triplicate screens and sequences of images of time-based works that utilize procedural methods addressing the relation of pattern to indeterminacy, aspects of representation, and audience desire.

In 1982 Dunkley-Smith was awarded an Overseas Fellowship at the Institute of Art and Urban Resources PS1, New York. From 1987 all his works were styled Perspectives for Conscious Alterations in Everyday Life...

Article

Dupain, Max  

Robert Smith

(well Spencer)

(b Sydney, April 22, 1911; d July 27, 1992).

Australian photographer (see fig.). By 1929, when he joined the New South Wales Photographic Society, he had been an enthusiastic photographer for five years. In 1930 he began exhibiting and became assistant to Cecil Bostock (1884–1939), a leading commercial photographer and devotee of Pictorial photography. Dupain studied art at the East Sydney Technical College and at Julian Ashton’s Art School in Sydney. Within three years he had left Bostock and broken with the Impressionist effects of Pictorialism in favour of European-derived styles emphasizing form, dramatic contrasts and adventurous choice of subject. After a subsequent period of experiment with various modern artistic idioms, by the late 1930s he achieved a distinctive personal style based on perceptive and imaginative attitudes to subject-matter. His work had a growing documentary tendency possessing an affinity with developments in the USA.

During World War II Dupain worked first in a camouflage unit and then for the Department of Information (until ...

Article

Flintoff, Thomas  

Australian, 19th century, male.

Active in the USA 1851-1855.

Born c. 1809, in Newcastle-on-Tyne, England; died 5 October 1891, in Melbourne.

Painter, photographer. Portraits.

Canberra (Nat. Library of Australia): Portrait of an Unknown Man (1879, oil on canvas)

Melbourne (Nat. Gal. of Victoria): ...

Article

Ford [Winslow], Sue  

Helen Ennis

(b Melbourne, March 19, 1943; d Melbourne, Nov 6, 2009).

Australian photographer, film maker, and video artist. Ford studied photography at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1961 and worked intermittently in the field of commercial photography in Melbourne until 1967. Her daughter Emma was born in 1967 and son Ben in 1968. Ford was a key figure in the development of the art photography movement in Australia and was one of the first women photographers to establish an independent art practice. Her earliest photographs, portraits of her female friends, were not exhibited at the time but were eventually shown at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 1982 and published in the book Sixtieth of a Second (1987). Ford’s first solo exhibition, Metamorphoses, was held in Melbourne in 1971 and her first Time series was exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, in 1974. She continued to exhibit regularly at public galleries and art museums in subsequent decades. ...

Article

Friedlander, Marti  

Leonard Bell

(b London, Feb 24, 1928).

New Zealand photographer. Born and trained in London, she migrated to New Zealand in 1958. By 1964 she was working as a freelance professional photographer, and was soon prominent in several genres, notably portraiture, in particular of artists, potters, writers, and children, and ‘street’ photography, as well as photojournalism for periodicals and newspapers, such as the Wine Review and the New Zealand Herald. Several highly successful books followed from the 1970s. A major exhibition of her work, organized by the Auckland Art Gallery, toured the country from 2001 to 2004. Subsequently, there have been further acclaimed exhibitions of her work. She is regarded as one the key photographers in New Zealand since World War II.

Friedlander’s portraits reveal an extraordinary ability to bring into visibility qualities of personality and temperament, while her photographs overall can be seen as explorations of places and their inhabitants, in particular the complexities of people’s relationships with their fellows and the societies they live in. In these explorations Friedlander herself was a participant, that is, her photographs are also investigations into her own place in specific social and cultural situations, whether in New Zealand, Israel, England, or Tokelau in the Pacific. For Instance, her photographs of elderly Maori women with ...

Article

Gill, Simryn  

Anthony Gardner

(b Singapore, July 12, 1959).

Malaysian conceptual artist, active also in Australia. Gill studied at the University of Western Sydney, completing her MA in 2001. Despite working in a range of media, she is best understood as a process-based artist who has consistently explored notions of migration and transformation within material culture. These include the effects of international trade on such everyday activities as cooking and eating. The spiral form of Forking Tongues (1992; Brisbane, Queensland A.G.), for example, entwines Western cutlery and dried chillies from the Americas and Asia, highlighting how foods and utensils from across the globe have come together to transform local cuisines and inform culinary habits. Gill’s later photographic series refer to other understandings of migration, such as the spread of the English language or of capitalist desire throughout South-east Asia in recent decades. For Forest (1998; Sydney, Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery; see Chua), Gill cut out words and sentences from books written in English, placed the texts within tropical landscapes and photographed the results before the books’ paper began rotting into the humid environment. For ...

Article

Gladwell, Shaun  

Charles Green

(b Sydney, Dec 13, 1972).

Australian photographer and video artist. Gladwell graduated in 1996 from the Sydney College of the Arts with a BFA and then from the College of Fine Arts, University of NSW, with an MFA in 2001. He then studied at Goldsmiths College, University of London, between 2001–2. Gladwell’s rise to acclaim was immediate, accelerated by the art market boom that lasted until the financial crash of 2008 and the proliferation of biennales around the globe, in many of which Gladwell participated (Venice Biennales, 2007 and 2009). With extraordinarily gorgeous, slow-motion cinematography but, importantly, a minimum of post-production digital manipulation, Gladwell’s early works consistently portrayed understated, seemingly casual feats of physical coordination, grace and physical endurance by young skateboarders, break-dancers (see fig.), capoeira practitioners or BMX cyclists. In his iconic early work, Storm Sequence (2000), the artist twisted and pirouetted in balletic slow motion on his skateboard in the face of an approaching storm as ocean waves crashed against the Bondi Beach foreshore upon which he was poised. In ...