(Installation View, pp. 86–92)
In 1919, Frank Hurley held his first one-person show at the Kodak Salon, situated above the Kodak showrooms at 379 George Street, Sydney.1 The exhibition was facilitated by Kodak’s local proprietor and Hurley’s friend, J. J. Rouse, cementing a close mutual relationship between Australia’s largest photography firm (a subsidiary of the multinational company Kodak) and the consummate self-publicist.
Hurley had returned to Sydney from the United Kingdom in late 1918 as both an Antarctic and war hero, and brought with him a set of toned gelatin silver enlargements and Paget plate colour transparencies he had received permission to make in London. He had them made from negatives and colour plates he had exposed on the Western Front and in Egypt and Palestine as one of the two official photographers for the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Earlier in 1918, in London, the other official Australian photographer, Hubert Wilkins, had helped organise Australia’s contribution to the Imperial War Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Later in 1918, before his return to Australia, Hurley had helped organise an exhibition of Australian war photography at London’s Grafton Galleries. While the Royal Academy exhibition featured numerous enlargements, including a mural-sized print of an Australian band marching through the ruins of Bapaume in March 1917, the Grafton Galleries exhibition also featured Paget plate colour lantern slides and giant mural-sized composite prints of battles made by the London firm Raines & Co.2
Hurley arrived in Sydney two days after the Armistice and in the middle of an influenza epidemic. In March 1919, once the epidemic had subsided, and venues could re-open, the New South Wales Governor’s wife officially launched Hurley’s Exhibition of War Photographs at the Kodak Salon with the words, ‘such photographs give a better idea of what happens in the trenches than any description can’.3 Later, Rouse displayed some of Hurley’s enlargements in Kodak’s window, above enticing displays of the vest pocket and Graflex cameras he had for sale.4
Hurley’s composite prints on display at Kodak were smaller than the giant murals presented the previous year in London, and it is highly probable that the colour transparencies were not projected by a magic lantern, as they had been in London at what were termed ‘lantern séances’.5 Nonetheless, the exhibition had a similar effect on Australian audiences. Both soldiers and civilians who were yearning to connect with the actual experience on the battlefield of returned (and killed) soldiers were moved by the ‘Realistic Collection’ which showed ‘the ‘real thing’.6 For the relatives of soldiers who visited, they were ‘grim reality’ graphically revealed. They grip one with the ‘intensity of the tragedy of war – its horrors and its pathos’.7
In fact, most of the battle scenes in the show were composites. In a remarkable forerunner to contemporary digital montage practice such as Jeff Wall and Andreas Gursky, viewers accepted Hurley’s reasoning that ‘[i]n order to convey accurate battle impressions, I have made several composite pictures, utilising a number of negatives for the purpose. The elements of these composites were all taken in action’.8 Visitors also responded to Hurley’s taste for the picturesque and the melodramatic. This made the exhibition ‘not merely photographs, but pictures – pictures in which a fine artistic touch helps enormously to bring home … the realities of the subjects portrayed’.9 Meanwhile, Hurley used the Paget process, where a three-colour matrix screen reproduced natural colours on a positive plate, to maximum advantage. The small 12 x 16 centimetre plates on display, presumably with some kind of back lighting, were, as one reviewer wrote, ‘very remarkable. They are not touched by hand, and show a wonderful transparence and light’.10
Hurley knew that the War Records Section planned to bring the complete collection of AIF photographs to Australia as part of a proposed war exhibition and museum. The war’s official historian Charles Bean arrived back in Australia three months later in early July 1919, full of plans for a war exhibition and war museum, and full of praise for the other official photographer Hubert Wilkins and the ‘many instances in which this officer risked his life in endeavouring to secure authentic pictures’.11 The War Records Section became the Australian War Museum and shipped the various London propaganda exhibitions to Australia, along with the 20,000 negatives the official photographers had shot, which it began to methodically index and catalogue. In August 1921, the first Australian War Museum exhibition of photographs opened at the Royal Exhibition Building in Melbourne. Eighty-three thousand people visited it in five weeks, whereas perhaps three thousand people had visited Hurley’s Kodak Salon exhibition. Although the Melbourne exhibition featured mural-sized enlargements, Hurley’s controversial composites had remained in London. Bean replaced Hurley’s picturesque and melodramatic visual sensibility with a methodical index. Each image was given a catalogue number, introduced at Bean’s suggestion to help the public buy commemorative prints (these catalogue numbers are still in place today in the Australian War Memorial’s digital index). Meanwhile, back in Sydney, Hurley had unsuccessfully attempted to sell his prints to the National Art Gallery of New South Wales (now the Art Gallery of New South Wales) immediately after his 1919 exhibition. Only later was Hurley able to persuade the librarian at the Mitchell Library to acquire the images, where they remain to this day.12
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Alasdair McGregor, Frank Hurley: A Photographer’s Life, Penguin Viking, Melbourne, 2004, p. 23. ↩
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In the lead up to the London Grafton Galleries exhibition Hurley had famously argued with the Head of the War Records Section C. E. W. Bean over his large composite battle murals. To Bean, the collaged battle murals were ‘fakes’ which undermined the ‘sacred’ integrity of his planned war history and war memorial. C. E. W. Bean, The Anzac Bulletin, vol. 40, 10 October 1917. See also: Martyn Jolly, ‘Australian First World War Photography: Frank Hurley and Charles Bean’, History of Photography, vol, 23, no. 2, 1999, pp. 141–8. ↩
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Daily Telegraph, Sydney, 13 March 1919, p. 3. ↩
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See: Capt. F. Hurley, ‘Exhibition of war photographs’, August 1917–August 1918. Held at the State Library of New South Wales, manuscript files PDX 19–PDX 31. These included the composite print, ‘106. A flight of bombing planes, 1st Australian Flying Corps, Palestine’; an aerial view, ‘110. Jerusalem from an aeroplane’; and a still powerful image of gassed soldiers, ‘35. The Battle of the Menin Road’. ↩
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‘Colour Photography of the Battlefield’, Monthly Supplement on Colour Photography, British Journal of Photography, 7 June 1918, p. 24. ↩
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Sydney Morning Herald, 13 March 1919, p. 6. ↩
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Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 1919, p. 14. ↩
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Catalogue of an Exhibition of War Photographs by Capt. F. Hurley, late Official Photographer with the A.I.F. held at The Kodak Salon, Sydney, 1919, n.p. ↩
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Sydney Morning Herald, 19 March 1919, p. 12. ↩
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Newcastle Morning Herald and Miners’ Advocate, 14 March 1919, p. 7. ↩
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Sydney Morning Herald, 7 July 1919, p. 9. ↩
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‘Typescript of information relating to the work of Captain Frank Hurley as official war photographer, AIF, during interview with Principal Librarian, Public Library of New South Wales, 27 June 1919’, State Library of New South Wales collection of WWI Papers, AH129, folder 1. ↩