Julian Smith (photographer)

Julian Smith
Smith in 1936 by W.B. McInnes
Born	Julian Augustus Romaine Smith 5 December 1873 (1873-12-05) Melbourne, Australia
Died	13 November 1947(1947-11-13) (aged 73) Melbourne
Alma mater	University of Adelaide, University of Melbourne
Occupation(s)	Surgeon, photographer
Movement	Pictorialism
Spouse	Edith Reynolds ​ (m. 1901)​
Signature

Julian Augustus Romaine Smith FRPS (1873–1947) was a British-Australian surgeon and photographer.

Early life and education

Julian Smith was born on 5 December 1873 in Camberwell, Surrey, England, the son of Rose Amelia Smith (née Pooley) and Captain Julian Augustus James Smith, master mariner. His family migrated to live in Halifax Street Adelaide, Australia three years later.

He was educated at Prince Alfred College and the University of Adelaide where he obtained a Bachelor of Science in 1892 and on graduation taught at his former school, returning to University to study medicine from 1893. He rowed in the winning Adelaide university crew in 1895–1896. However a mass resignation of all honorary physicians and surgeons due to disagreement between the board of management of the Royal Adelaide Hospital and the government ceased clinical instruction, so that in 1897 Smith and seventeen other students had to move to Melbourne to complete their studies, and there he rowed in and coached the Ormond College rowing crew 1897–1898.

Smith graduated with M.B. in 1898 and B.S. in 1899 at the top of his year, with exhibitions, and prizes including that offered by the estate of Dr. James George Beaney for bacteriology in surgery. He was made senior resident medical officer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital, and was interim medical superintendent. He obtained his M.D. (Melbourne) in 1901 followed by the degree of Master of Surgery (Adelaide) in 1908, examined by Professor Welsh, of the University of Sydney, and Dr. Reissmann and Professor of operative surgery Archibald Watson of Adelaide University. His thesis was "The Treatment Surgical Tuberculosis" from his research on the treatment of tuberculosis by vaccines, in the opsonic method developed by Sir Almroth Wright, with whom Smith worked when in London.

Surgeon

Dr Julian Smith (1930s) The theatre sister

In April 1901 Smith began general practice at Morwell, Gippsland where he was appointed Health Officer, with an early task of dealing with an outbreak of diphtheria. He and Edith Mary Reynolds were married by Archdeacon Langley at St Paul's Cathedral, Melbourne on 24 September that year.

While the couple lived in Gippsland, their first son was born on 21 January 1903. In January 1906, to the regret of friends and patients, though he returned to operate on patients there until 1912, he left Morwell to practice as a junior partner in the Simpson Street, East Melbourne surgery of Frederic Bird. Considerable attention from the press was given in 1912 to Smith's depositions supporting claimants suing the Railway Commissioners after an accident at Yea, during which Smith's and other medico's fees were questioned.

He was appointed honorary demonstrator of surgery at the University of Melbourne in mid-1907, and also elected honorary surgeon at St Vincent's Hospital, Melbourne, and influenced its recognition as a clinical school of the university during 1909. He successfully established rooms at 59 Collins Street (later at 2 Collins Street) and a private hospital. One of his patients was Tasmanian Senator Rudolph Ready, and in 1918 Albury Anzac veteran and grazier George Robert Jackson bequethed him £3000. In 1927 he became a Foundation Fellow of the (Royal) Australasian College of Surgeons. He retired from St Vincents and was appointed consulting surgeon in 1929.

In 1936 he retired from practice, but in World War II returned to surgery. From his interests in haematology, he made the prototypes of a pump for transfusing blood direct from donor to patient, and devised a machine for sharpening and polishing transfusion and other needles, both inventions advanced surgical treatment. As a member of the British Medical Association in 1901–36 he promulgated views on surgery, particularly on diseases of the urinary tract, at branch meetings and his research in urology and transfusion was published in the Medical Journal of Australia.

Photographer

Dr Julian Smith (1930s) Self-portrait

Recognised as a distinguished surgeon in Melbourne, Smith succeeded in a parallel career as an eminent photographer when, having taken up the medium in the 1920s and exhibiting with the Melbourne Camera Club, he devoted time to it in his late forties. He specialised in portraiture which he exhibited locally and internationally. He helped establish the Victorian Photographic Salon as a founding member in 1929. In 1946 the Australasian Photo-Review paid tribute to him;

"It is safe to assume that every Australian photographer is familiar with the work of Dr. Julian Smith His artistic genius, his technical skill and his versatility are famous, not only in Australia, but throughout the whole world of pictorial photography."

He was elected an honorary fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. In his early history of the medium in Australia Jack Cato asserted that Smith "had no superior in any part of the world". His portraits are in an outmoded Pictorialist style in a period of the emerging New Photography, artistically lit with orchestrated, sometimes melodramatic, poses, and printed with radical overexposure in pyrocatechin developer and bleaching-back with ferricyanide. In his more contrived, but popular, 'character study' tableaux the subject may be costumed as a protagonist from Dickens, Shakespeare, or from nursery rhymes.

"Dr Julian Smith is represented by four of his capable portrait studies perhaps character studies would be a more apt description. He uses emphasis of lighting in a dramatic way, and thus heightens the drama already suggested by the disposition of the model."

Smith's character studies appeared with an article explaining his technique in Contemporary Photography, and he achieved international recognition; the American Annual of Photography featured his "My Aims and Methods" in 1941. Unafraid to express his forthright opinions, in 1935 after the 3rd Canadian salon, he wrote to Eric Brown, director of the National Gallery of Canada, to complain "about the selection methods, the acceptance of photogravure as a photographic process, the recognition or not of certain technical processes" and the definition of "experimental photography."

Portraitist

Smith was a mentor to portraitist and fashion photographer Athol Shmith, whose studio was also in the 'Paris End' of Collins Street, Melbourne.

Julian Smith's subjects, many of them celebrated Australians, include virologist Frank Macfarlane Burnet, artist John Shirlow, pathologist Howard Florey, E. B. Hawkes, photographer Monte Luke, photographer F. C. Tilney, politician Alfred Stephen, artist Lionel Lindsay, Gwendolyn M. Bernard, William Dargie, Dr. Thomas Wood, poet John Shaw Neilson, Sir Robert Gibson, Beatrice Baillieu, actor Gregan McMahon, Bernard O'Dowd, dancer Sono Osato, artist Murray Griffin, Royal Physician Thomas Horder, aviator Charles Kingsford Smith, actor Frank Talbot, James E. Paton, photographer Dudley Johnston, Colonel Walter E. Summons, Dr. John Dale, Neil Hamilton Fairley, anatomist Professor Frederic Wood Jones, writer Robert Henderson Croll, and community worker and writer Paquita Mawson.

Legacy

Smith died of cancer on 13 November 1947 at his East Melbourne home aged 74, and was cremated at Springvale with Anglican rites. His wife, two sons and daughter survived him. Smith was a pigeon breeder, and known for dancing to relax between operating in the surgery; Joan Lindsay remembered that "trifling eccentricities [. . . ] gave Dr Julian his unique flavour. Behind the rather petulant façade he was a good clever and kindly man, mourned by thousands of friends and patients when he died." Posthumously, Kodak published a portfolio of Smith's portraits, Fifty Masterpieces of Photography. W. B. McInnes's portrait of Dr Julian Smith won the Archibald in 1936.

Exhibitions

Posthumous

• 1948, 5–23 April: The Dr. Julian Smith Memorial Collection, Kodak Salon Galleries, 386 George Street, Sydney
• 1958, September to November: The Memorial Exhibition of Character Portrait Studies by the late Dr Julian Smith, The Kodak Galleries, Sep – Nov 1958

Collections

• National Portrait Gallery
• National Library of Australia
• State Library of Victoria
• National Gallery of Victoria
• Art Gallery of New South Wales
• Adelaide University Research and Scholarship Collection

Gallery

• Photographs by Julian Smith
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