Mark Strizic, photographer.

Mark Strizic was born in Berlin in 1928 and migrated to Melbourne from Zagreb , Croatia in 1950. With no formal training in photography, he began taking photographs of his adopted city using a 35mm camera. Taken on the spur of the moment, against the light, Strizic’s photographs of Melbourne circa 1955-60 demonstrate a selective eye and an intuition for the poetic aspects of image making. His preoccupation was with the more lyrical aspects of the city and its people. Streets and lanes, pavements and gutters, the elderly, office workers, pedestrians, commuters, window shoppers and al fresco diners were his chosen subjects.

Abandoning studies in physics, Strizic resolved to make photography his vocation and in 1957 became a full-time photographer. He soon developed a reputation for his architectural and industrial photography, undertaking commissions for BHP, Humes Limited and McPhersons, and being the photographer of choice for several modernist architects, including Robin Boyd. Strizic’s acceptance of commercial work sealed his fate as a professional photographer. It necessitated the purchase of expensive large format photographic equipment that could only be paid for by undertaking further commissions.

For Strizic, photography was not only a vocation, but was a means for expressing his social and creative concerns. Desiring to free himself from the constraints and limitations of the camera-captured image, from around 1970 he began combining and transforming elements from his black and white negatives through colour and technical manipulation. Through the use of lurid colours reminiscent of the colour-saturated world of popular culture, he transposed symbols of urban ugliness such as power poles and billboards into a world of the imagination, making the familiar appear absurd, and commenting critically on the quality of urban Australian society. Many of these images present a prognostic vision, a premonition of an apocalypse. They express the artist’s personal feelings regarding the state of the world, and have been created with the intention of encouraging a social consciousness.

Strizic has also incorporated his innovative image-making approaches in numerous mural commissions. Combining straight (or literal) photography, overpainting, collage elements and computer imaging techniques, his mixed media works represent a crossing of the normally accepted boundaries between photography and painting. In a career spanning almost fifty years Mark Strizic has explored the full aesthetic potential of the medium of photography, challenged its technical limitations and moulded it to his constructive purpose.

(source: http://www.portrait.gov.au/site/exhibition_subsite_strizic3.php)