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Details
- Date
- circa 1938
- Media category
- Photograph
- Materials used
- gelatin silver photograph
- Dimensions
- 26.3 x 30.5 cm image/sheet
- Signature & date
Signed c. verso, ink "Cecil W Bostock". Not dated.
- Credit
- Gift of Max Dupain 1980
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 108.1980
- Copyright
- Artist information
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Cecil Bostock
Works in the collection
- Share
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About
Bostock remains an enigmatic personality in Australian pictorial and early modernist photography. This is at least in part due to his body of work being scattered on his death in 1939 as it was auctioned to cover his debts. Fortunately ‘Phenomena’ was left to his former assistant Max Dupain who had worked with him from 1930 to 1933. Dupain later wrote: ‘I spent three years with this very thorough craftsman and the study of his exacting and original methods formed a solid background for my future work and development. It was a tortuous experience for such a sensitive fresher.’1
Bostock was a founding member of the Sydney Camera Circle in 1916. He became a member of the Royal Photographic Society in London while overseas on war service and on his return to Sydney in 1920 he set up as a photographer specialising in photographic work for advertising and industry. He was also a skilled craftsman in bookbinding (as his father had been). He edited and designed the catalogues for his fellow pictorialists and remained a member of the Camera Circle until the end of 1935. However, he was always somewhat eccentric in his photography in comparison to the dominant soft-focus style. His work was usually more direct and his interest in form and abstraction was clear from the early 1930s. He joined the independent Contemporary Camera Groupe and exhibited with them in 1938. He also supported Dupain in his early experimentation.
‘Phenomena’ was one of 11 photographs Bostock exhibited with the Contemporary Camera Groupe and it was placed in the window at David Jones along with other photographs such as ‘Plum blossom’ 1937 by Olive Cotton and ‘Mechanisation of art’ by Laurence Le Guay. ‘Phenomena’ is a wonderful modernist work with its plays of light and dark and disorienting shapes and curving lines. It is impossible to tell exactly how the shapes are made or where the light is coming from, nor what the objects are. It could easily be exhibited upside down 2 where the viewer could be looking down on objects arranged on a flat surface. ‘Phenomena’ is a tribute to Bostock’s restless, inventive and exacting abilities.
1. Newton G 1980, ‘Max Dupain’, David Ell Press, Sydney p 20
2. As it appears in Newton G 1988, op cit p 112, but from the signature and notations on the back of this print it is most likely that the work should be seen as reproduced here, where it is much more difficult to comprehend the shapes© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007
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Exhibition history
Shown in 13 exhibitions
The Thirties and Australia, S.H. Ervin Gallery, The Rocks, 19 Jun 1980–13 Jul 1980
Three years on: acquisitions 1978-81, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Oct 1981–01 Dec 1981
Seeing is believing - the art in photography, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 13 Dec 1985–19 Jan 1986
Onsight, Exhibition Venue Unknown, , 1988–1988
Shades of Light, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, 1988–1988
Works from the Photography Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 10 Feb 1989–15 May 1989
Photographs from the Collection, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 Mar 1993–09 May 1993
Critic's Choice, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 22 Apr 1994–10 Jul 1994
Soft Shadows and Sharp Lines: Australian photography from Cazneaux to Dupain, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 30 Sep 2002–17 Nov 2002
Flatlands: photography and everyday space, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 13 Sep 2012–03 Feb 2013
Flatlands: photography & everyday space, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 15 Sep 2012–03 Feb 2013
Sydney Moderns, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 06 Jul 2013–07 Oct 2013
Call of the Avant-Garde: Constructivism and Australian Art, Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, 05 Jul 2017–08 Oct 2017
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Bibliography
Referenced in 12 publications
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Judy Annear, Photography: Art Gallery of New South Wales Collection, 'Australian modernism', pg.131-149, Sydney, 2007, frontispiece (illus.), 144 (illus.).
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Natasha Bullock (Curator), Soft shadows and sharp lines: Australian photography from Cazneaux to Dupain, Sydney, 2002. no pagination or catalogue numbers
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Vigen Galstyan, Look, 'Infinite flatness: exploring the intangible', pg. 28-29, Sydney, Oct 2012, 29.
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Ewen McDonald, AGNSW Collections, 'From Colonialism to late Modernism', pg. 7-106, Sydney, 1994, 40 (illus.).
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Robert McFarlane, Critic's Choice, Sydney, 1994.
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Melissa Miles, The Language of Light and Dark, ‘Painting with Light: Abstract Visions’, pg. 161-214, Australia, 2015, 171, 173 (illus.). fig. 4.8
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Denise Mimmocchi, Sydney moderns: art for a new world, 'Still-life as laboratory table', pg.198-213, Sydney, 2013, 203, 212 (illus.).
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Gael Newton, Silver and Grey - Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900-1950, 1980. plate no. 60
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Gael Newtown, Three years on: a selection of acquisitions 1978-1981, 'Photography - Australian, European and American', pg. 67-84, Sydney, 1981, 72 (illus.). cat.no. 12
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Ursula Prunster., Seeing is believing: the art in photography, 'Seeing is believing: the art of photography', Sydney, 1985. cat.no. 3
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S.H. Ervin Gallery, The Thirties and Australia, Sydney, 1980, 18. cat.no. 107
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Donald Williams, In our own image: the story of Australian art, 'The Modern Artist 1913-1940', pg.89-115, Sydney, 2002, 108 (illus.).
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