Mark Strizic

Mark Strizic (Croatian spelling: Strižić) was a 20th-century German-born Australian photographer, teacher of photography, and artist.

Best known for his architectural and industrial photography, he was also a portraitist of significant Australians, and fine art photographer and painter known for his multimedia mural work.

Strizic and other post-war immigrant photographers Wolfgang Sievers, Henry Talbot, Richard Woldendorp, Bruno Benini, Margaret Michaelis, Dieter Muller, David Mist and Helmut Newton brought modernism to Australian photography.

Marko Strizic was born in 1928 in Berlin, Germany, where his Croatian father, Zdenko Strižić (1902–1990), was studying and practising architecture (later becoming a professor of architecture ).

His mother was a textile designer, trained in Berlin, who contributed to Zdenko's practice.

In 1934, in reaction to Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor, the family fled to Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia).

There Strizic began to study physics and geology.

At the end of WW2, Strizic fled to Austria as a refugee following the liberation of Yugoslavia to escape the Communist regime.

As there was a five-year waiting period to emigrate to the United States, he decided to go instead to Australia.

He departed Naples on the converted Royal Australian Navy seaplane carrier SS Hellenic Prince, arriving in Melbourne in on Anzac Day, 25 April 1950.

Strizic's good spoken English soon gained him a position as a clerk with the Victorian Railways Reclamation Department, and he resumed his studies in physics part-time at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.

By the turn of the century Strizic's urban record of Melbourne of the 1950s and 1960s was regarded as of historical interest, as National Gallery of Victoria photography curator Isobel Crombie remarked in a 1999 interview;

In 1952 he married Hungarian-born Sue.

Friendship with David Saunders, (who had stayed with Strizic's parents in Yugoslavia in 1952 ) a senior lecturer in architecture at the University of Melbourne who was then acting assistant director at the National Gallery of Victoria, provided Strizic with increasingly frequent photography commissions.

Photography was a tool he used in his studies in physics, which in 1957 he abandoned for a career in the medium, in which he was encouraged by his father (who visited Melbourne in 1957 as guest professor at the School of Architecture Melbourne University); Zdenko Strižić had only recently exhibited his own collection of photographs, of the traditional architecture of Zagreb, and published a limited-edition book of high-quality reproductions of them, Svjetla i sjene ('Light and Shadows').

Strizic and James S. Bigham formed a partnership in a photography business at 1 Beech Street, Surrey Hills before moving it to Strizic's home at 1 Francis Street, Richmond.

In 1957 Saunders introduced him to Leonard French, an artist and the gallery's exhibitions officer, who asked him to document exhibitions, including the 1959 retrospective of cabinet maker Schulim Krimper's furniture.

Postwar industrialisation in Australia led then to work for mining company BHP, civil engineers Humes Limited and manufacturers McPhersons, photographing the plants, manufacturing, products and workers for annual reports and advertising, while the concurrent housing boom provided further opportunities.

Again through Saunders, in 1958, Strizic met modernist Robin Boyd of architectural firm Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, who became a major client.

Strizic dissolved his partnership with Bigham on the latter's retirement in 1960, and established his studio, neighbouring those of other photographers, in Collins Street, Melbourne in what was known as 'The Paris End'.

His clients there included Westminster Carpets whose advertisements of he mid-60s featured his interiors and are unusual in including a credit line to the photographer.

Boyd controversially criticised Australian suburban culture in his book The Australian Ugliness of 1960, and Strizic echoed these sentiments in writing, and in his photography began to illustrate Australians' disdain for their architectural heritage and their scant regard for the visual aesthetics of their urban environment amidst the destruction of magnificent Gold Rush era buildings and verandahs and their replacement by high-rise modernist office-blocks.

This work was widely published in architectural books and journals but also illustrated social commentary during this period of a national identity crisis with frequent contributions of his photo-essays on a wide range of subjects to Walkabout, Overseas trading, The Bulletin, Australia Today and other magazines (see below the range of books containing his photographs).

In 1960 Strizic joined David Saunders to produce Melbourne: A Portrait, stating 'Its central thought is that while men make cities, the cities also affect the men.' The Age book reviewer Richard Troy described Strizic's contribution; "The photography is startlingly imaginative and startlingly beautiful—beautiful, not in the sense of the word as movie-advertisement copy writers use it, but in the sense that truth is beautiful".

In 1968 he was official stills photographer on director Tim Burstall's 2000 Weeks.

A Two Thousand Weeks 'photo novel', illustrated with stills by Strizic and the film's director of photography, Robin Copping, with layout design by Strizic, was published by Sun Books as a movie tie-in in late 1968.

Over several years during the mid-1980s Strizic was resident artist documenting the cultural activities of the City of Knox from which he produced two murals for the Council foyer.

He participated with artist Rex Keogh and composer Geoffrey D'ombrain in recording their community participation art events later exhibited at Knox and at the Arts Ministry.

In 1984 he became a full-time artist, photographer and designer and the winner of a number of photographic awards and grants.

In 1987 his exhibition notes for The 1950s – Photographs by Mark Strizic, which launched a book illustrated with the same images, and shown at the Melbourne C.A.E. and Gryphon Gallery, Strizic discusses his motivation in taking up the camera;

"These pictures reveal my response to a new environment. Photography at that time was far from my ambition (I was devoted to a loftier calling). It was to be the end of that decade before photography became my sole income. At that time the names of Kertesz and Brassaï (not to mention Friedlander) were unknown to me, and photography as something intriguing only became [gradually] apparent ... The mood of these pictures may betray a somber or nostalgic soul lost in a new country, but that is very far from my feelings at that time. I was exhilarated by the opulence of Australia in contrast to Europe – mesmerized by the acute light and over-joyed by my recent marriage."

He enjoyed shooting into the sun contre-jour, and capturing low afternoon side-lighting effects for their high-contrast graphic silhouettes in black and white prints, and that became his signature style for his historically and culturally significant photographs of post-war Melbourne.

He found a market for large scale mural installations amongst corporate clients and exhibited artistic works in the same media, work he continued into the late 1990s.

Sydney Morning Herald critic Robert McFarlane in 1997 emphasises Strizic's European eye, comparing him to Robert Frank as an "illuminated outsider", one whose images of Australian urban society are often droll, and their design revealing;

They settled in Richmond, subsequently renovating and moving into a large two-storey terrace at 61 Park Street, South Yarra, to South Melbourne and Kew, and finally to Wallan in country Victoria, living there until his death in 2012.

In 2013 a bushfire destroyed his home and studio and his entire collection of prints, though the State Library Victoria had acquired the majority of his negatives in 2007.

Sue Strizic died in 2015.

Strizic bought his first camera, a Diaxette and began to photograph his environment, developing a love of strong light which he found abundant under the clear skies of his adopted city.

"'He captured the essence or the place at that particular time...the mixture of 19th century and modern bulldlnga. He alerts us to the fact Melbourne was undergoing massive change – a process of modernisation'"

That is the tenor of books of his photography that appeared at this time by Emma Matthews, Judith Buckrich and Rees Barrett