Helen Shaw

item details

NameHelen Shaw

ProductionFrank Hofmann; photographer; 1952; New Zealand

Classificationgelatin silver prints, portraits, vintage prints, black-and-white prints, black-and-white photographs, works of art

Materialssilver, photographic paper, photographic gelatin, mounting board

Materials Summaryblack and white photograph, gelatin silver print

Techniquesblack-and-white photography

DimensionsImage: 377mm (height), 301mm (length)

Registration NumberO.003594

Credit lineGift of the artist, 1986

Overview

This essay originally appeared in New Zealand Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2018).

Frank Hofmann arrived in New Zealand in 1940 after fleeing the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. Like Austrian émigré Richard Sharell, he brought with him a more sophisticated vision of photography as art than existed in New Zealand at the time. As a member of the progressive Prague Photographic Society, he had been exposed to both pictorialism and the more avant-garde New Photography, and both influences run through his own work.

In 1941 Hofmann joined the studio of Clifton Firth, then the most sophisticated and fashionable portrait studio in Auckland. Firth’s style was very theatrical, with careful composition and strong, contrasty lighting effects. Hofmann’s photograph of his wife, the writer and editor Helen Shaw, is perhaps unique in New Zealand photography for the way it brings such studio approaches to a domestic portrait. Shaw’s cultured appearance and assured pose, cigarette in hand, is a perfect complement to the composition of geometric modernity carefully constructed by Hofmann’s use of artificial lighting. Such an image reflects his view that, in photography, ‘All that matters is lighting and composition and the personality that is projected.’1

Through Firth, Hofmann made many acquaintances in the Auckland cultural scene, among them modernist architects such as Vernon Brown and the Group Architects, and he became a major recorder of their work. Untitled (Architectural composition) was taken at the Parnell Baths, designed by city architect Tibor Donner, before a mural was added to the wall. The image recalls the abstract patterning often featured in Subjective Photography, the post-war movement that attempted to revive 1920s New Photography. Such work, or the derivatives seen in international photography magazines in the 1950s, suggests a fusion of rendered-down versions of both modernism and pictorialism. Certainly Hofmann’s image looks very modern, in keeping with its subject matter, but he also implicitly placed it within a pictorialist framework in a 1962 Home and Building article, where it was used to illustrate the compositional rules typically associated with camera club pictorialism.2

Athol McCredie

1 Cited in Riemke Ensing, ‘The portraits of Frank Hofmann’, Art New Zealand, no. 46, Autumn 1988, p. 96.

2 Frank Hofmann, ‘Photographic presence of mind’, Home and Building, June 1962, p. 61.