Harold Pierce Cazneaux was born in
Wellington,
New Zealand on 30 March 1878. His father Pierce Mott Cazneau was an English-born photographer and his mother
Emily Florence Cazneau was a colourist, miniature painter and photographer from Sydney. Around 1890 the family moved to Adelaide, where the father began working for
Hammer & Co., photographers with a studio in
Rundle Street. Cazneaux received further education at (unnamed) state schools in Adelaide, and worked for his father, taking night classes at the
School of Design, Painting and Technical Art. In 1896 he started working for
Hammer & Co. as a photo retoucher. and the £100 prize money went toward a deposit for his future home. He was a founder of
The Sydney Camera Circle, whose
pictorialist "
manifesto" was drawn up and signed on 28 November 1916 by a group of six photographers:
Cecil Bostock, James Stening, William Stewart White, Malcolm McKinnon and James Paton, later joined by
Henri Mallard. This group pledged "to work and to advance pictorial photography and to show our own Australia in terms of sunlight rather than those of greyness and dismal shadows"., at home. He left Freeman & Co. in 1917 or 1918, to work freelance, with greater creative freedom. In 1921 he was elected a member of the London Salon and in 1937 he was the first Australian to be conferred with Honorary Fellowship by the Royal Photographic Society. Beyond his photographic
oeuvre, Cazneaux was also a prolific writer. As a correspondent for Photograms of the Year (UK) for more than twenty years, he was the international voice of Australian photography. He was official photographer for Sydney Ure Smith's lifestyle magazine
The Home from 1920 to 1941, and was commissioned to produce images for a number of Ure Smith's publications, including Sydney Surfing (1929), The Bridge Book (1930), The Sydney Book (1931) and The Australian Native Bear Book (1932). He also contributed to Ure Smith's prestige magazines
Art in Australia and
Australia: National Journal. His work encompassed the whole range of realist photography: portraiture, street scenes and landscape, notably in later years the
Flinders Ranges. He was fascinated by old and new Sydney, particularly the
Sydney Harbour Bridge and beach culture. He was a master of
bromoil techniques, blurring out distracting features. His daughters acted as assistants and often appeared in his images. students in the school in 1934 The use of light was a defining characteristic of Cazneaux' later work and in 1916 he and others formed the Sydney Camera Circle, establishing the so-called 'Sunshine School' of photography. The Circle was created for a number of important reasons: it embraced the particularities of Australian light and landscape, and was a move away from the English-inspired darker imagery dominating photographic practice at that time. Cazneaux died in his sleep at the age of 75. ==Recognition==