‘By the brush or by the camera’

Pictorialism/Modernism (1901–40s)

By Michael Hawker

‘150 Years: Photography in Queensland’ June 2009

The question of photography’s status as art began to be debated in Australia at the turn of the twentieth century. Dr John Thomson, president of the Queensland Amateur Photographic Society, observed in 1899 that photography was not one of the fine arts because art was ‘something with a soul in it, appealing to our better selves’.¹ His statement provoked a response from Mark Blow, proprietor of the Crown Photographic Studios in Sydney, who wrote that a picture that appealed to ‘our noblest nature’ was art, ‘whether it was produced by the brush or by the camera’.²

Max Dupain / Australia NSW 1911–1992 / Boy on tractor, Queensland c.1950s, printed 1987 / Gelatin silver photograph on paper / 43.3 x 40.3cm / Gift of CSR Limited through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1987 / Collection: QAGOMA / © Max Dupain/Copyright Agency

The detailed realism of nineteenth-century photography grew less prominent in the early 1900s, with the rise of soft-focus, romantic pictorialist photography. The number of practitioners increased due to advances in film development and camera production, and interest in artistic photography was renewed with the formation of the Queensland Camera Club in Brisbane in 1923, followed by the opening of its first Photographic Salon in 1924. Members took their lead from contemporary Australian painting and its popular landscape tradition. However, from the mid 1930s, pictorialist photographers such as Rose Simmonds and FG Crook-King were being influenced by a new, modernist photography with its emphasis on machine forms, clean lines, unusual camera angles and juxtapositions.³ This style had assumed a dominant position internationally, especially in the mass media, commercial and fashion photography, and particularly after World War One. With a clear relationship to modern movements in art such as Cubism and Surrealism, the new photography seemed especially suited to the changing modern era.

Anne-Marie Willis, Picturing Australia: A History of Photography, Angus and Robertson, North Ryde, NSW, 1988, p.132.
Willis, p.132.
Sue Smith, ‘Queensland Pictorialism: Australian and international influences on Queensland photography 1920–1950’, in Queensland Pictorialist Photography 1920–1950 [exhibition catalogue], Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane, 1984, p.14.