Turkey

John Kauffmann was born in South Australia. After a period apprenticed to an architectural firm in Adelaide, he went overseas in 1887. In Europe he studied photographic chemistry and reproduction processes and became interested in the work of the pioneering British pictorialists. He returned to Adelaide in 1897 and held an exhibition of his work in February of the following year. It had an enormous impact on the young Harold Cazneaux, who wrote ‘here was a new beauty beyond anything I had dreamed of in terms of the camera’.1

In 1909 Kauffmann moved to Melbourne and became a professional photographer. By 1919 his reputation was so established that the critic Leslie Beer published a book on him, one of the first monographs on any Australian artist. Kauffmann does not appear to have done any portraiture work, working instead for ‘The Home’ magazine and as the photographer for various books. Like the painters Hans Heysen and Claude Monet, Kauffmann invests his animal subjects with human qualities, the oval format of ‘Turkey’ suggesting a 19th-century painted portrait. This is a carbon print, one of Kauffmann’s favoured processes. Carbon prints often have a richness of shadow which approximates that of an oil painting, as the emulsion is relatively thick and there is the sense of looking through a layer of pigment. During the 1930s Kauffmann turned to close-up floral studies having become embittered by the lack of interest in the European pictorialist aesthetic at which he excelled.

1. Cato J 1955, 'The story of the camera in Australia', Georgian House, Melbourne p 151

© Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007