Athol Shmith

Louis Athol Shmith (19 August 1914 – 21 October 1990) was an Australian studio portrait and fashion photographer and photography educator in his home city of Melbourne, Australia.

He contributed to the promotion of international photography within Australia as much as to the fostering of Australian photography in the world scene.

Shmith was born in Melbourne in 1914 into a comfortable and cultured middle-class family, the youngest of three children of Harry Wolf Shmith, manufacturing chemist and accomplished pianist, and his wife Genetta, née Epstein, both born in England.

Shmith played piano and vibraphone and considered music as a possible career.

His father gave him a camera as a teenager and what was a hobby became a profession in his late teens when Shmith, who had an interest in theatre and played at charity performances, was asked to take the publicity photographs and stills for a show.

He saw there was a career in his former hobby and, supported by his family, established a studio in St Kilda at 75A Fltzroy Street.

He was also indebted to the top-lit and back-lit glowing 'Hollywood lighting' style of portraiture popularised by Californian photographer George Hurrell in the 1920s and 1930s.

He described his portrait of actress Vivien Leigh in costume as lit by his 'inky dinky light', a top spotlight diffused by tracing paper.

Shmith treated his female sitters and models as princesses.

For the first five years he specialised in theatre work and society and wedding portraits through which he first made his reputation, but his professional break had come in the early 1930s when he gained the contract to take portraits of visiting celebrities for the newly formed Australian Broadcasting Commission.

Shmith's work expanded to include a range of commercial advertising and illustration and appeared in local society magazines.

By the late 1930s, he was seen as representing a new modern style of work.

The outbreak of the Second World War interrupted the studio work Shmith had just commenced after his move into the city.

When he attempted to enlist, he failed the medical examination, but he conducted photographic analyses for the army, including the interpretation of aerials of the American landing in Italy.

His studio produced portrait photographs of hundreds of servicewomen and men, including those of many Americans on leave in Melbourne.

To meet demand, he employed numbers of other photographers including Hans Hasenpflug.

He exhibited his works in photographic salons at home and abroad, gaining a Fellowship of the Royal Photographic Society in 1933.

At the age of just 19 he was appointed Vice-Regal Photographer in Melbourne.

He long held the contract for stage and publicity photography for theatre producer J.C. Williamson Limited.

At a mere twenty-five years of age, in 1939 he became a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and Shmith moved his business to a studio in the Rue de la Paix building at 125 Collins Street, run with the assistance of his brother Clive, and sister, Verna, who was his receptionist and who became an expert negative retoucher.

The studio had originally been fitted out for Helena Rubenstein, and retained her elegant powder blue and deep pink fittings.

Influenced in his early career by the soft Pictorialist style of turn-of-the-century art photographers, Shmith later embraced the clearer light, bolder compositions and design emphasis of art deco modernism which he admired in the fashion, product and portrait work of (Sir) Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen and Hollywood portraitist George Hurrell.

Shmith was represented internationally by the Pix agency which brought his work to the cover of LIFE magazine of 3 Aug 1942; his portrait of the son of General MacArthur who was in the country with his family at the time.

Inside were several of his pictures illustrating a story on the general's pretty wife and his son whiling away a Melbourne winter, while for a previous issue, 27 Jul 1942, Shmith had provided a photograph of MacArthur's air commander Lieutenant General George H. Brett playing cribbage (with 'U.S.A. cards' and matches, emphasises the caption) in a Melbourne restaurant with Brigadier General Ralph Boyce.

After World War II Shmith embraced the "New Look" and the spirit of post-war recovery in fashion illustration, becoming the most respected professional in the field in Australia.

The studio was increasingly associated with zestful, creative fashion photography.

Shmith, who prided himself on his skill in lighting, had learned much from the model of European modernism and the quirkiness of surrealism.

His technical expertise was also considerable; in 1945, he co-developed and patented (application 1947, granted 1950) a photo-finish racecourse camera invented by his friend, Melbourne scientist Bertram Alston Pearl; the 'Camera Graph' continuous-flow film system, with the innovation of a neon lamp in the finish-post, the oscillations of which record a time-register on the image.

Smith was responsible for devising a rapid film processing method that would cut the time to 65 seconds, enabling course officials to announce a result moments after the running of the race.

The system was first officially used on 6 July 1946 and adopted throughout Australia.

In 1950 John Cato, the son of Jack Cato became co-director of Shmith's studio, who recalled that Shmith; "...was a man of enormous enthusiasms. He was childlike because he always embraced new things - novelty was tremendously important to him. Even when he was in his 70s, he always wanted the latest camera or lens. His lighting techniques were theatrical. He used Hollywood spotlights when the generation before him used floodlights. He was theatrical - an urbane, debonair guy with this enormous magnetism but was enormously insecure underneath."From the 1960s Shmith responded to cultural shifts with a freeing-up of the style and setting of his fashion photographs.

He moved from the studio into everyday environments, like the street and beach.

Shmith acknowledged as his inspiration during this period the work of Richard Avedon.

Athol Shmith's commercial career produced photographs that embodied a world of grace, glamour and allure and his dramatic portraits remain a record of significant personalities of his era.

Throughout the 1960s Shmith remained energetic and dynamic in his development of fashion work, but by the close of the decade he took on roles in photographic heritage and education.

Shmith was a member, and later, president, of the Institute of Victorian Photographers.

In 1968 he was made an honorary life member of the Institute of Australian Photographers.

In the same year he was instrumental in founding the photographic department at the National Gallery of Victoria, the first in Australia, and among the first at public galleries worldwide.

Jennie Boddington was appointed as its first curator and she commissioned Shmith, as NGV council member (1972–75), to travel to Britain and France in 1973, to acquire international photographs for the collection.

As a consequence, in 1975 he established a fruitful partnership between the gallery and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France which led to numbers of Australian photographers' work entering their collection.