The spirit of endurance

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.

In this work, we see one of Cazneaux’s most iconic photographs, The spirit of endurance, printed directly from the negative rather than the alternate orientation that Cazneaux devised years after its capture. The photograph already held in the Gallery’s collection, Spirit of endurance 1937 (134.1975) was gifted by the Cazneaux family in 1975 and depicts the same scene, flipped in reverse, though from a closer, cropped vantage and with some manual manipulations made to the negative that extend branches. Cazneaux felt this orientation had more emotive resonance as the gash in the tree had a clear directional pull within the image. It was to this flipped version that Cazneaux attributed the title The spirit of endurance which was an allusion to WWII, a reference that had particular poignance for Cazneaux as it evoked the loss of his son. This photograph, printed before that narrative was applied to the work, demonstrates the decisions made by Cazneaux to turn a straightforward landscape image into a compelling and powerful metaphor.

The negatives for these works were taken in May 1937 while Cazneaux camped with his family in the Flinders Ranges, South Australia. The photograph depicts a monumental river red gum with exposed roots and gaping hollow, set against the Flinders Ranges. In his essay ‘Endurance’ in the Art Gallery monograph Harold Cazneaux: artist in photography, Geoffrey Batchen elucidates Cazneaux’s ‘aspirations and achievements as an Australian artist’ through a close examination of this well-known image and its many versions.