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December 11, 2003
Courtesy of Boynton
Harold Cazneaux, Second Valley, South Australia, 1937.
Cazneaux was a pictorialist who became a (reluctant) modernist. The latter embraced the modernist photographic aesthetic of sharply focused, "straight" photographs that made a virtue of the optical clarity and precision of the camera, and emphasised the beauty of pure form:
H. CazneauxStaircase, Elizabeth Bay House, 1930.
Pictorialism was an aesthetically motivated photography that defended photography as art, when the medium was not accepted as an art form. It rejected the ethos of documentary photography in favor of the taste and feeling that expressed the photographer's personal artistic vision, usually through a soft-focus.
Second Valley is on the western side of the Fleurieu Peninsula, which lies south of Adelaide. We often go sea kayaking around Second Valley. I've often photographed there. Victor Harbor, where our holiday shack is, lies on the southern coast of the Peninsula.
A lot of artists have painted the Peninsula. The difficulty in finding the many art works representing the Peninsula since the 1840s has led me to start moves to set up an online regional gallery.
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