Grainger Photographs
by Brian Allison
Percy Grainger understood the power of the photograph to entice and persuade an adoring public and to document significant events.
The Grainger Museum Archive includes close to 15,000 photographs. The majority of these are images of people, including many signed portraits gifted to Grainger by eminent musicians and intimate associates. Numerous photographs detail the composer's social milieu as well as his physical being.
With his arrival in London in 1901, Grainger moved into a world where the photograph - specifically the sophisticated studio portrait - was currency within an intricate game of social positioning. The inscription of a fashionable photographer's name on promotional material added a certain gloss to the performer's image.
Grainger was photographed by one of the most fashionable and innovative photographers of the Edwardian era, Baron Adolph de Meyer.
De Meyer was both an artist and a professional photographer. His photographs reflect the prevailing characteristics of art photography of his day. Negatives and prints were heavily manipulated and photographs were often taken using soft focus. Detail was stripped away and the quality of light on surfaces, as well as the modulation of shadows, became as much the subject as the sitter. A portrait of de Meyer by his contemporary, Gertrude Kasebier, is a graphic composition of light and shadow as well as being a portrait of the Baron of Saxony.
When Grainger's fiancé, Margot Harrison, commissioned a portrait of herself by H. Walter Barnett in 1913, she acquired a very expensive present for her lover.
Despite his humble beginnings alongside a youthful Tom Roberts (the Heidelberg painter) in the studio of Stewart & Co. in Melbourne, Barnett combined a brilliant business mind with an extraordinarily gifted photographic eye, to become one of the most sought-after society portraitists in Melbourne, New York and London respectively.
Jack Cato (who worked for Barnett) records in his book The Story of the Camera in Australia, that in 1909, a single portrait sitting with Barnett cost £37.
After World War One, Fredrick Morse, a young professional photographer, built a house next door to Percy and Rose Grainger in White Plains, New York. He produced many of Grainger's promotional photographs during the 1920s, '30s and '40s as well as informally documenting the Grainger household and Percy's eclectic pursuits. Their association became close, with Morse periodically working as Percy's secretary and as an occasional wrestling partner.
In complete contrast to the imagery of Percy Grainger's public life, the photographs in the Grainger Collection's 'Lust Branch' (Grainger's title) provide insight into an undercurrent of erotic tension in the composer's private world. The Collection includes over 200 professionally produced erotic photographs ranging from ubiquitous 'naughty post cards' to hand-enlarged 8 x 10 inch black and white photographs that blur the boundaries between erotica and art photography.
From early adulthood, Grainger taught himself elementary photographic techniques to document aspects of his own sexual expression. Initially he experimented with conventional nude photographs, but by the mid-1920s, he systematically recorded he and his wife in the aftermath of flagellation, printing the results in a makeshift darkroom.
As an obsessive 'auto-archivist' and collector, Percy Grainger compiled unedited visual evidence of his life, accompanying and illuminating his vast archive of personal correspondence, essays and sound recordings.