Louis Athol Shmith , FRPS, (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.
Early life Shmith was born in Melbourne in 1914 into a comfortable and cultured middle-class family, the youngest of three, after Verna and Clive, of Harry Wolf Shmith, an analytical chemist associated with Mr. George. R. Nicholas in the formulation of aspirin for mass production, and an accomplished pianist, and his wife Genetta, née Epstein, both born in England. When he celebrated his 21st birthday, Shmith's family lived at 'Grasmere' 181 Barkly Street, St Kilda. Shmith played piano and vibraphone and considered music as a possible career.
Professional photographer Shmith's 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, including acts with the 'Youth and Laughter Revue', was asked to take the publicity photographs and stills for a show. He saw there was a career in his former hobby and, for the first five years he specialised in theatre work and society and wedding portraits through which he first made his reputation. He exhibited his works in photographic salons at home and abroad. At age 17 his work, among 7,000 international entries was awarded a bronze plaque in the Colonial and Overseas photographic Exhibition, and shown in the Royal Photographic Society’s salon in London. In early 1933 and supported by his family, he established a studio in 'The Warwick', newly built by Joseph Plottel, at 75A Fltzroy Street, cnr. Jackson Street, St Kilda and in May that year his portrait of John Atkinson, an Australian Air Force pilot, was exhibited as the only Australian entry in the International Salon of Photography, Chicago.
Shmith's 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 including Table Talk, with cover images by 1934, by which time he was starting to concentrate on fashion, and had joined the social set himself, with his family holidays being reported in newspapers. At the age of just 19 he was appointed Vice-Regal Photographer in Melbourne, and was contracted for stage and publicity photography by theatre producer J.C. Williamson Limited.
When in 1936 he showed with Julian Smith and Spencer Shier in the annual exhibition of the Victorian salon of photography at the Athenaeum Galleries, modernist artist and Sun newspaper critic George Bell praised Shmith's "delicate tonal nuance in Nude in Repose," and a pictorial report in The Australasian featured his Technical Inspection from the same show. He exhibited in October at the Kodak gallery, when Harold Herbert of The Argus noted that "Mr. Athol Shmith is original in Nude In Repose. That year he was advertising as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA), had secured the Myer Emporium as a fashion client, and The Argus ran a congratulatory article on his overseas successes at "only 22 years"; in Boston's American Annual competition; the Chicago Century of Progress Fair; receiving a request from Arnold Glngrlch, founder of Esquire for examples of his work; and as the subject of a special article in the French art magazine La Revue Moderne. He won prizes in Yugoslavia and Vienna, then in 1937 exhibited at the Cape Town and Dublin international salon, and in June it was reported that he had been made an Associate of the British Royal Photographic Society. By the late mid-1930s, he was seen as representing a new modern style of work, and to meet demand, he employed other photographers including Hans Hasenpflug in 1937. Shmith was active in the Melbourne Camera Club from 1938, for whose members he held demonstrations in his studio.
Collins Street studio After the death of his father in November 1938, in 1939 Shmith, then merely twenty-five years of age, became a Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society and moved his business to a studio in the Rue de la Paix building at 125 Collins Street,Shmith, Michael 'Paris, Melbourne', Chapter Two of 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 and, as Newton notes, contemporaries May and Mina Moore, 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. He exhibited again with the Victorian Salon of Photography at the Athenaeum in August 1939.
War years
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, and made donations to The Australian Comforts Fund. His studio produced portrait photographs of hundreds of servicewomen and men, including those of many Americans on leave in Melbourne.Aimee Board 'Progressive pictures', 25 July 2017, National Portrait Gallery
Shmith was represented internationally by the Pix agency which brought his work to the cover of LIFE magazine of 3 August 1942; his portrait of the son of General MacArthur who was in the country with his family at the time.LIFE, 3 Aug, Vol. 13, No. 5, cover, pp. 66, 67, ISSN 0024-3019, Time Inc 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 July 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.LIFE, 27 Jul 1942, p. 27, ISSN 0024-3019, Time Inc
The 'New Look' After World War II Shmith embraced the "New Look":"In 1948, an event occurred which was to have a huge impact on the Australian fashion scene: Myer imported a selection of Christian Dior's breathtaking 'New Look' garments. To introduce these beautiful gowns to an avid Australian audience, a group of French models was brought to Melbourne for the opening parades. Athol Shmith was appointed the official photographer"Maynard, Margaret (1995) 'The Wishful Feeling About Curves': Fashion, Femininity, and the 'New Look' in Australia. Journal of Design History (1995) 8(1): 43–59 doi:10.1093/jdh/8.1.43 and the spirit of post-war recovery in fashion illustration, becoming the most respected professional in the field in Australia. In 1947 he represented Melbourne among the fifteen mostly Sydney professionals who exhibited when the Institute of Photographic Illustrators, formed in 1947, had its first show in 1949, and to counter a perceived Sydney bias, Max Dupain later urged him, Dacre Stubbs, Helmut Newton, Norman Ikin and Wolfgang Sievers to form the institute's Melbourne chapter.
His studio was increasingly associated with zestful, creative fashion photography, and Shmith, who prided himself on his skill in lighting, had learned much from the model of European modernism and the quirkiness of surrealism. 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. 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. page 63 Shmith acknowledged as his inspiration during this period the work of Richard Avedon.
Contributions to photography in Australia 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.
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.Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences entry 'Photo finish camera, multi lens, metal alloy, Auto Ray Pty Ltd, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia, 1949' 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.
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 as an appointed member, with gallery director Eric Westbrook, Dacre Stubbs and Albert Brown, of the advisory panel, 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.
Photographic educator
In 1971 Shmith left his studio to take on a new role as head of the Photography Department at Prahran College of Advanced Education, replacing Gordon De'Lisle. He taught therePascoe, Joseph and Victorian College of the Arts. Creating: the Victorian College of the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan Australia, 2000. p. 9. , with his business partner John Catosee Cato, John. Athol Shmith (obituary) Art and Australia Vol 29 No 1 Spring 1991 p. 43 and the film-maker Paul Cox with whom he exhibited at the Australian Centre for Photography in 1977. While teaching he produced and exhibited his 1973 psychedelic 'Anamorphic Series' now held in the collection of the National Gallery of Australia.