From State Library of Victoria News No. 27, November 2004 - February 2005
Recently the Pictures Collection was fortunate to receive a collection of 648 negatives and associated studio paperwork by portrait photographer Ruth Hollick (1883–1977).
The collection came from the National Gallery of Australia and joins the Library’s existing holdings of over 500 works by Ruth Hollick, which were donated to the Library in 1993 by Lucy Crosbie Morrison, Hollick’s niece and studio assistant.
Ruth Hollick is noted for her portraits of children and of Melbourne society’s elite in the 1910s to 1930s. She studied art at the National Gallery School in Melbourne, and used her training and artistic eye to develop an intimate and engaging style in her photographic portraiture. Described as a pictorialist by art historians, she would often use only natural available light in her portraits to create soft, atmospheric scenes. She advertised herself as an ‘art photographer’ and exhibited widely in Australian and international photographic exhibitions. |
While at art school, Hollick had established close friendships with Dorothy Izard, who later became her professional partner; the painter Dora Wilson; and the photographer Pegg Clarke. She took over the well-known photography studio of Mina and May Moore in 1918, where her career flourished, as did her social life. The fashionable studio on Collins Street was the location for a number of parties for Hollick’s wide circle of friends from the art world.
Not professionally trained as a photographer, her intuitive style evidently served her well, as she became one of Melbourne’s leading photographers in the 1920s. The onset of the Great Depression did not affect her client list, but it meant that she had to relocate her studio from Collins Street, Melbourne, to her home in Moonee Ponds, where she worked until the 1950s, photographing a who’s who of Melbourne’s privileged class and their children. Nellie Melba commissioned her, as did Keith and Elisabeth Murdoch. When the stylish magazine The Home began publication in 1920 in Sydney, Hollick was appointed by the publisher to provide the Melbourne content (Harold Cazneaux was responsible for the Sydney material). An international-style magazine in the mould of Vogue, The Home contained information and advertisements about all things sophisticated and modern. Her pictorialist portraits of debutantes, society weddings and children, dominated the early issues, and among the portraits published, there survive examples of the earliest known fashion photographs in Australia.
The NGA believed that the Hollick archive of negatives was not well served by its location in Canberra, and while of aesthetic value and quality, it would nonetheless be of greater value in Victoria, and in a library, where social historians and descendants of the subjects of the portraits could more easily access the collection.
Negotiations between the State Library of Victoria and the NGA for the transfer of the archive began in 1996, and the happy finale was the delivery of the material to the Picture Collection in April this year. The collection is currently in the process of being accessioned, and will soon be catalogued and digitised on the online image database. The richness of the collection will then be available not only to Victorians, but the whole world through the Internet.
We are grateful to Gael Newton, Senior Curator of Photography, NGA, and to her staff, whose rigorous and scholarly research has meant that Ruth Hollick’s important place in Australia’s history of photography can be appreciated by all.
Olga Tsara
Librarian, Pictures Collection
References
Barbara Hall and Jenni Mather, Australian Women Photographers 1840-1960, Richmond (Vic.), 1986, pp. 64–66
Daniel Palmer and Kate Rhodes, "High Society to High Concept: moments of Australian Fashion Photography", Photofile, 71: Winter 2004, pp. 34–41
Gael Newton and Karen Jacubec, "Ruth Hollick and Portrait Photography Between the Wars", Australian Antique Collector, No 54, July 1998, pp. 168–170
Illustrations:
Left: Group of young women posed in a tableau, possibly of 'Spring', c. 1925-35
Right: Bust of a woman, with short bob hairstyle and wearing scarf, c. 1920-30 |
