From Princes Bridge 1955

Summary

This is an original Strizic photograph depicting four barges on the Yarra River taken from Princes Bridge. A second identical print, also an original, is also in the collection, catalogued at AM 1783023 Mark Strizic (1928–2012) arrived in Australia in 1951, part of the wave of postwar migrants arriving from Eastern Europe. This renowned Australian photographer studied not his chosen art form but rather physics and geology in Zagreb, in the former Yugoslavia. Strizic picked up the camera after arriving in Melbourne, purchasing this from a pharmacy as a means to explore his new home environment. He became a commercial photographer in 1957, building his reputation primarily as an architectural and industrial photographer in an era of intense urban development. He soon became associated with a coterie of Melbourne modernists, including Robin Boyd, Schulim Krimper and fellow photographers Athol Shmith and Wolfgang Sievers. Often framed by his progressive social and political concerns, his work is overwhelmingly sympathetic with modernist ideals: humanist, rational, spare. The Art and Heritage Collection holds around 40 photographic works by Strizic, almost all of which document the streets, river and life of mid-century Melbourne in expressive monochrome. Many of these works came into the collection through direct engagement with the artist in 2005. Photographed from Princes Bridge in 1955, this scene of small vessels in convoy along the Yarra depicts a most unfamiliar view of the famously brown and murky river. The C-type gelatin print entered the collection in 2005.