Two portraits of photographer and missionary Norman Deck. Sydney, 1905.

Two carbon print photographs, each 145 x 110 mm, on the original textured card mounts, 305 x 190 mm, both  signed and inscribed on the mount in pencil by the photographer ‘H. Cazneaux / Portraits’; verso of one mount inscribed in pencil in Deck’s hand ‘Norman Deck 1905. Portrait by H. Cazneaux’; both prints are in superb condition; one of the mounts has a few spots of foxing to the margins recto and some old glue marks verso.

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; the pair of portraits offered here is clearly a sequence from one particular sitting in 1905.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales holds an archive of Deck’s negatives; Deck’s work is also represented in both the National Gallery of Australia and the National Library of Australia.

Provenance: Norman Deck (1882-1980); Joyce Evans Collection, Melbourne.