Mark Strizic


Mark Strizic was a 20th-century Croatian-Australian photographer 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.

Early life & migration

Marko Strizic was born in 1928 in Berlin, where his father, Zdenko Strižić, was studying and practising architecture. His mother was a textile designer, trained in Berlin, who contributed to Zdenko's practice. In 1934, in reaction to Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor, the family fled to Zagreb, Yugoslavia. 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 Australian Navy seaplane carrier Hellenic Prince, arriving in Melbourne in April 1950. There his 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.
In 1952 he married Hungarian-born Sue. He settled in Richmond, subsequently moving with his wife to South Yarra, South Melbourne and Kew, and finally to Wallan, in country Victoria, living there until his death in 2012.

Photography

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 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. His abandonment of physics in 1957 for a career in photography was encouraged by his father ; Zdenko Strizic 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.

Commercial career

Friendship with David Saunders, 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. 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 furniture. Postwar industrialisation in Australia led then to work for mining company BHP, civil engineers and manufacturers , photographing the plants, manufacturing, products and workers for annual reports and advertising, while the concurrent housing boom provided further opportunities. Strizic established his studios in Collins Street, Melbourne in what was known as 'The Paris End'.

Visual critique of Australian culture

Again through Saunders, in 1958, Strizic met modernist Robin Boyd of architectural firm Grounds, Romberg and Boyd, who became a major clients. Boyd controversially criticised Australian suburban culture in his book The Australian Ugliness of 1960, and likewise Strizic's 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 to Walkabout, Australia Today and other travel magazines. 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.'

Fine art

Having exhibited there with Athol Shmith in 1958, Strizic become the first photographer to exhibit solo at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968 and the first whose work was acquired by the National Gallery of Australia. In 1984 he became a full-time artist, photographer and designer and the winner of a number of photographic awards and grants and finding a market for large scale mural installations amongst corporate clients. He began combining, enlarging, cropping and transforming elements from his black and white negatives through montage, then and posterising the monochrome images in the manner associated with Pop Art. Symbols of urban ugliness such as power poles and billboards were his subject matter and critical target in often apocalyptic imagery intended to provoke a social consciousness. He was an early adopter of digital imaging techniques in producing such murals. Strizic's work is represented in the Australian National Gallery and several state galleries and in corporate collections.

Portraitist

Strizic made portraits of significant Australians including academics, scientists and those involved in the arts and these are held in collections including those of the Australian National Gallery, the National Gallery of Victoria and the State Library of Victoria. The majority were shot in 1968 for the book Involvement. He used 35mm at a time when medium or large format was the norm for portraiture, and his use of long focal lengths, available light and shallow depth of field sets the sitter into their environment.
His output in the genre was considerable; those he photographed included Karl Duldig, Sir Ian Potter, Harold Hughan, Shulim Krimper, Clifford Last, Inge King, Lenton Parr, Fred Williams, Vincent Jomantas, Norma Redpath, John Brack, Ian B. Sprague, Dr Joseph Brown, Noel Counihan, Rudy Komon, T. Zikaras, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Rhonda Senbergs, David Roberts, Barry Humphries, Dr Ernest Fooks, Prof. Zdenko Strizic, Chief Librarian Colin Alexander McCallum, Marilyn Hill, Dr. E. Graeme Robertson, Dr. Noel Macainsh, Dr. Antal Zador, Geoffrey Dutton, Father Michael Scott, Professor A. R. Chisholm, John Howley, Barry Jones AO, Michael Shannon, Leonard French, Sir Charles Moses, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Mayor of South Melbourne Doris Catherine Condon, Anne Hall, Asher Bilu, Charles Blackman, Alexander Buzo, Sir Samuel Wadham, Les Gray, Clifton Pugh, Peter O'Shaughnessy, Frank Dalby Davison, David Tolley, Owen Webster, John Olsen, Robin Boyd, Tim Burstall, Matcham Skipper, Professor Richard Downing, Georges Mora, and Tom Sanders.

Influence

Strizic taught photography at tertiary level in Melbourne from 1978, lecturing at a number of tertiary education institutions including Preston Institute of Technology ; Melbourne College of Advanced Education ; and as part-time lecturer in Photography at the Victorian College of the Arts.

Books by or illustrated by Strizic

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Include:
The Visual Art/ Craft Board's Emeritus Fellowship 1993