Born: 1894, Sydney
Death: 9th March 1947
William Buckle was born and educated in Sydney in 1894 and enlisted to serve with the artillery in France during World War 1. It was after the war, while traveling around Europe with his parents, that Buckle became interested in photography. Upon his return to Australia, Buckle set up a car dealership in Melbourne, where he married in 1924 and had two children. The family moved to Sydney in 1927 where Buckle established the Buckle Motors Trading Company in William Street, specializing in the sale of European cars. He also became involved in car racing, breaking the Sydney to Melbourne light car record around 1939.
Buckle set up a darkroom in his Sydney home and produced most of his photographic work in the 1930s and early 1940s, exhibiting regularly with the Photographic Society of New South Wales and the Sydney Camera Circle, of which he was a member. Occasionally his photographs were published in The Home magazine and the annual Australian Photography. Buckle also wrote about photography, publishing the article 'The Photographer as Artist' in Art in Australia in 1940. Promoting photography as a valid and expressive form of art, Buckle argued that 'there is as much artistic vision and as great an adherence to the recognized principles of art, emotional, tonal, and compositional, in the finest photographic creations of today as there is in the best of contemporary painting'. This interest in the relationship between the two mediums was an underlying concern for Buckle, having also studied the principles and history of painting. He collected the work of Hans Heysen and Elioth Gruner, which whom he became friends.
In his photographic work Buckle produced landscapes, nudes, genre scenes and studies of women. His work deviates from the stylistic and aesthetic mannerisms of Pictorialism and that of his contemporaries within the Sydney Camera Circle. He possessed a predilection for sharper focus and photographed his subjects so they were recognizable and unique rather than generic or metaphoric tropes. This is particularly true of his portraits of women in domestic or natural settings. Buckle’s female subjects are portrayed as pure and idealized yet they retain their own distinct characteristics.
Untitled (Asian woman, head and shoulders) circa 1939
The model in this photograph is Rita Young (nee Lee), popular artists model who worked in Sydney for photographers
Max Dupain and Kerry Dundas and painters Norman Lindsay, Rah Fizelle and Ralph Balson among others.
left: Untitled (Woman in sun hat with parasol) date 1938-1946
middle: Untitled (Sand dunes at dusk) date 1938-1946
right: Untitled (Asian woman, head study-large) date 1938-1946
left: Dusk on the river date 1940-1945
middle: Storm passing date 1940-1945
right: Lisa date 1936-1938
left: Norman Lindsay (with model ship) date 1936
middle: Norman Lindsay (with model ship - close up) date 1936
right: Norman Lindsay (in front of painting) date 1936
left: The deck hand date 1938-1941
middle: Untitled (Blonde woman on beach in swimsuit) date 1938-1946
right: Untitled (Girl in cottage) date 1936-1940
left: Interior date 1940-1945
middle: Interior date 1940-1945
right: Bunty date 1940-1945
left: Bunty by Trees date 1940-1945
middle: Untitled (Two women) date 1938-1946
right: Untitled (Woman in dark trousers) date 1938-1946
left: Untitled (Woman by tree stump) date 1938-1946
middle: Interior II date 1938-1946
right: No title (Standing woman leaning against a sideboard) c.1930-39
left: No title (Portrait of smiling woman wearing a hat) c.1930-39
middle: Elioth Gruner painting "Banks of the Molonglo River" (Gruner sitting on a box) c.1937
right: Elioth Gruner painting "Banks of the Molonglo River" c.1937