Portrait of photographer and missionary Norman Deck playing the piano. Riley Street, North Sydney, c.1905.

Gelatin silver print photograph, 120 x 85 mm; verso inscribed in black biro ‘Taken by Cazneaux at his house in Riley St.’, and in purple ink ‘Joyce Elmslie, 5 Oberon Cres., Gordon’ (presumably a neighbour of Cazneaux at a later date); the print is unmounted and in excellent condition.

Sydney-born photographer and missionary Norman Cathcart Deck (1882-1980) trained as a dentist at Sydney University and in 1906 went into practice for several years; however, he had a religious vocation, and from 1914 until 1948 he worked as a missionary in the Solomon Islands. After his retirement in 1948 he spent the remainder of his life in Sydney. Deck displayed a passion and talent for photography from an early age, and was the youngest ever member of the Photographic Society of New South Wales when he joined in 1896. From this moment up until his final years he documented his entire life through his photography, his most typical images, and the bulk of his oeuvre, being landscapes in the pictorialist style.

The celebrated photographer Harold Cazneaux (1878-1953) is known to have photographed his friend and near-contemporary Deck on several occasions; this portrait of Deck playing piano by candlelight was taken at Cazneaux’s house in Riley Street, North Sydney around 1905. Cazneaux later lived and worked out of his home “Ambleside” in Gordon, which was a major hub for early twentieth-century Sydney photographers and members of the Sydney Camera Circle (of which Deck was an honorary member).

The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds an archive of Deck’s negatives. It also holds (ARC104.61.52) a print of a companion photograph of Deck playing the piano clearly taken at the same time as the Cazneaux photograph we offer here, which entered the collection around 1978 as a gift of the Sydney Camera Circle. The AGNSW print is, however, catalogued as ‘artist unknown’.

Provenance: Harold Cazneaux (1878-1953); Joyce Elmslie; Norman Deck (1882-1980); Joyce Evans Collection, Melbourne.