Stanley Eutrope was born in Melbourne and from 1917 exhibited with the Victorian Pictorial Workers Society and the Photographic Society of New South Wales. He moved to Sydney in 1920, exhibiting with the Sydney Camera Circle, nationally and overseas. In 1929, Eutrope moved to Brisbane, where he joined Harrington’s Pty Ltd, an importer of photographic goods that published a monthly photographic journal – the company was subsequently acquired by Kodak (Australasia).

From Eutrope’s arrival in Brisbane, he became an active member of the Queensland Camera Club, formed in 1922 to advance photography’s status as an artform. The club held its first ‘salon’ in 1924 at Kodak’s Queen Street premises. Eutrope was adept at the bromoil process, through which the silver in a photograph is removed and replaced with ink to create the tonal variations favoured by pictorialist photographers. He gave a demonstration of the technique to members of the club in 1933, the same year he served as its president. This gelatin silver photograph shows that Eutrope was as attuned to modernist photography’s focus on simplified forms and dramatic light effects as he was to the painterly qualities of Pictorialism.