Harold Cazneaux

Harold Cazneaux (30 March 1878 – 19 June 1953) was an Australian pictorialist photographer; a pioneer whose style had an indelible impact on the development of Australian photographic history. In 1916, he was a founding member of the Pictorialist Sydney Camera Circle. 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 Cazneaux (1878-1953) was born on in Wellington, New Zealand on 30 March 1878. His father Pierce Mott Cazneaux was an English-born photographer and his mother Emily Florence was a colourist and miniature painter from Sydney. In the 1890s the family moved to Adelaide and Harold started to working in his father's studio and attended H. P. Gill's evening classes at the School of Design, Painting and Technical Arts.

In 1904 he decided to move to Sydney where he took up a position with one of Sydney's oldest photo studios, Freeman & Co. Clearly he was good at the job as he was later appointed the firm's manager and chief operator. At the same time he honed his photographic skills documenting the architecture of old Sydney and in 1907 exhibited the Photographic Society of New South Wales. In 1909 he held the first one-man exhibition in Australia.

Cazneaux's prints were exhibited in solo shows in the windows of the Kodak Salon, Sydney, as well as international 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 deposit for his future home.

He was a founder of the Sydney Camera Circle whose Pictorialist "manifesto" was drawn up and signed on 28 November 1916 by a group of six photographers: , James Stening, W. S. White, Malcolm McKinnon and James Paton, later joined by Henri Mallard. This group pledged "to work and to advance pictorial photography and to show our own Australia in terms of sunlight rather than those of greyness and dismal shadows".

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 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).

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