Landscape (approaching the mountains)

Harold Cazneaux is one of the most historically important photographers in Australia. He began his career as a commercial studio photographer in Adelaide before turning his attention to the possibilities of open-air photography. In Sydney, Cazneaux experimented with the aesthetics of pictorialism, a movement which sought to establish photography as a fine art mediated by the manipulations of the photographer. His establishment of the Sydney Camera Circle in 1916 helped to foster a local photographic style that harnessed the effects of Australia’s distinctive sunlight.

Cazneaux’s extraordinary photographic output spans landscapes, urban street scenes and portraiture, in a style characterised by pictorialist soft focus, the bold and distinctive use of sunlight, and later, modernist principles of cropped and flattened composition. In 1920, Cazneaux was made chief photographer of the newly launched magazine The Home, styled after the cosmopolitanism and quality of Vogue. In his stirring images of the Australian landscape, Cazneaux helped to define the pictorial conventions of a subject previously captured only in paint.