Gordon De Lisle

Gordon Franklin de Lisle (28 Feb 1923–2002) FRPS, FRSA, EFIAP (Excellence de la Federation de l' Art Photographique) was an Australian commercial photographer, lecturer in photography and gallery owner.

De Lisle, who in business styled his name 'De'Lisle', was born in Melbourne 28 Feb 1923.

His father was Arthur Thoby Haversleigh Prinsep, a member of the well-known Prinsep family.

Prinsep was an actor, journalist and fiction writer, who wrote under the name of Fabiau Esme D’Aigular Coligney De L'Isle, and Frankland De Lisle.

Prinsep, known as De Lisle at the time, died when Gordon was 11.

Gordon left school at 13 to help support his mother Ada (who later lived in Mt Macedon) and sister.

He trained in photography from 1939 as a cadet at age fifteen on the pictorial staff of The Daily Telegraph (Sydney) and The Australian Women's Weekly.

When the war began he joined the merchant marine and participated in the evacuation of the Solomon Islands, then at eighteen joined the RAAF as a radar operator, but was soon reassigned as a photographer.

He flew in Catalina flying-boats for four years on reconnaissance and torpedo-training duties, with frequent assignments to Mitchell and Liberator squadrons.

He was engaged in 1945 to Bettie Tuck.

He found time and means during the war to write and photograph for newspapers and magazines including an article on Marjorie Lawrence's concerts for armed service personnel.

After his demobilisation in 1945 De Lisle faced charges and a £2 fine for keeping his Colt service pistol in ignorance of Victorian regulations being at odds with Queensland's.

After the war in 1947 De'Lisle opened his own photographic studios in the Exhibition Buildings specialising in society portraits, industrial, aerial and automotive photography, and met, and on 20 February 1948 married after nearly a year's engagement, Merton Hall-educated model Cynthia Ferguson of Malvern, who worked for Georges department store.

Parties associated with the engagement and wedding were well publicised and the Lord Mayor Sir Raymond Connelly attended the reception.

They travelled 1948–1949, he first to Indonesia before the couple toured Britain and Europe, then returned to Melbourne before the birth in April 1949 of their first child Jeanine (Jennie) Christina.

He installed his business at 9 Collins Street in the Grosvenor Chambers where Wolfgang Sievers also had a studio only doors away from their friend Athol Shmith, to concentrate on commercial and fashion photography.

The Department of Trade and Industry was amongst his clients.

From 1949 De Lisle was a stringer for the Sydney Morning Herald magazine and newspaper group in Melbourne and was living in the wealthy suburb of Brighton in Grosvenor Court, 260 St Kilda Street.

Victorian premier of 1955–72, Henry Bolte's vice squad raided his family home, confiscating his "pornography"; nudes for which he was then winning international awards, an experience which confirmed his vehemently expressed opposition to censorship, particularly of the arts.

He relinquished the SMH role when in 1958/9 director Stanley Kramer appointed him stills photographer on the motion picture On the Beach, to produce thousands of production prints for the film.

Subsequently, he returned to advertising photography.

De Lisle was a member of Melbourne Camera Club and exhibited with Group M in the 1960s and won international photographic contests.

Among other prizes was a third in the U.S. Camera magazine international contest, from 158,000 entries, and in 1960 the magazine noted that "of 5 prizes being shipped to Australia, 4 are going to one photographer, Gordon De Lisle, a past U.S. Camera winner."

His series of "Australia" posters won awards in American Art Directors' exhibitions, with one winning thirteen.

Through this franchise his picture of a tractor-driving monkey was published in Life magazine in February 1963 and, by popular demand, a whole series from the same story May 1964.

In 1963 De Lisle and his wife Cynthia started a publishing company, Joey Books Pty.

Ltd., and with writer Joyce Nicholson photographed and designed their first book Kerri and Honey, one of a series of their children's books with the same author.

In 1966 he was styling his business more broadly as "public relations" and advertised for "PR men" using the tone-drop-out image of a pouting woman apparently speaking the words.

A member of the Institute of Australian Photographers (IAP) he was the invited speaker at its October 1969 'Hypo' bi-annual convention in Canberra at which he agitated for better remuneration for photographic services; "'This is a profession where a photographer with a lifetime of training and with plant worth $20,000 finishes with exactly the same money for taking a fashion photograph, processing it, retouching it, packing it and delivering a ten-by-eight print as does his model: whose plant is a bra, panties, and a pair of false eyelashes! This is a profession whose ideas are pillaged consistently and blatantly by art directors of advertising agencies; who pay the photographers’ meagre fees, with luck and after endless dispute, in five months. Above all, this is a weak-kneed, spineless profession, whose members wallow in apathy and self-adoration; while those trades and professions about them get on with the task.

Do any of you really feel any concern for your image?

Are you content to be made to look like bumbling congenital idiots on television?

Are you content to do more and more, yet accept less and less?

Are you content to slash the “ground from under your contemporaries by every known price-cutting device?

And here’s something of particular importance to your wives and children!

Do you know what the community thinks of you?

The Sociology Department of the University of New South Wales does!

It finds you enjoying precisely the same esteem in the eyes of your fellow citizens as do beekeepers, [and] bank clerks...'"

In 1970 De Lisle, then in his late forties, followed Ian McKenzie as Senior Lecturer in Charge Photography in the Diploma stream of Prahran College of Technology where he researched videotape and electronic education, hired by the vocationally-oriented graphic designer Principal Alan Warren but after suffering a severe heart attack in 1971 was replaced, by the incoming Principal Dr David Armstrong, with Athol Shmith.

While at Prahran he worked on his high-contrast photomontage series on “the raped land, Australia, as it would appear to a woman who returns from the dead to discover that her country, too, is dying,” which combined his love of the Australian landscape and the female form, and was exhibited and published in 1972 in the Ilford-funded Concern.

Though he contributed to charities, and decried cruelty to sheep, and expressed sympathy for the plight of Marilyn Monroe in letters to newspapers, De Lisle had a reputation at the college for a wolfish attitude to young women, and one of De Lisle's students, and employee at his studio, was Graham Howe, who regarded him "as the Sam Haskins of Australia".