John Cato

John Chester Cato was an Australian photographer and teacher. Cato started his career as a commercial photographer and later moved towards fine-art photography and education. Cato spent most of his life in Melbourne, Australia.

Photography career

John Chester Cato was born on November 2, 1926, in Hobart, Tasmania, to Mary Booth and John Cato.
His career in photography started at the age of 12 as an apprentice to his father, Jack Cato. Returning in 1946 after service in the Pacific for the Royal Australian Navy during WW2, Cato worked as a self-employed photographer before being hired by The Argus as a press photographer in 1947.
Cato held that position until 1950 when he became a photographer and assistant for Athol Shmith Pty Ltd. in the Rue de la Paix building at 125 Collins Street, Melbourne. He married Dawn Helen Cadwallader of Brighton at the register at St. Mary's Church of England, East Caulfield, in October that year. Their eldest son, also John, was born in 1952.
During this period he undertook research for his father Jack on the latter's The Story of the Camera in Australia published in 1955. That year, Cato and Shmith became business partners and started Athol Shmith–John Cato Pty Ltd.
When the MoMA's The Family of Man exhibition came to Melbourne's Preston Motors Show Room on February 23, 1959, Cato visited the show several times and was inspired by its humanist themes and optimism.
The partners' business was prospering and at times employed 26 staff and hired other photographers including Norman Ikin and Hans Hasenpflug to cope with the volume of business. By 1958 they were known so well by the public that their portraits could be used to endorse a television brand in its advertising. Cato's clients included U.S.P. Benson Pty. Ltd., Worth Hosiery, Myer, Hammersley Iron Pty Ltd, The Australian Ballet, Southern Cross Hotel and General Motors, and his fashion photography occupied full pages of newspapers and magazines.
Nevertheless Cato moved away from commercial photography in 1974 after experiencing what he described as "a kind of menopause". Shortly after leaving his partnership with Athol Shmith, Cato began his teaching career and started to focus on fine art photography. Cato was one of the first photographers in Melbourne to give up their commercial practice to become a fine art photographer.

Fine art photography

In 1970, four years before leaving his commercial practice, Cato began exploring photography as an art form. His fine art photography drew connections between humanity and the environment, exploring a different theme in each photo essay.
Cato made 'straight' landscape photographs usually with large or medium-format cameras in order to "explore the elements of the landscape", usually enhancing these in printing. Over a ten-year period, Cato spent two years at a time focusing on a particular symbolic theme in the Australian landscape, often spending a large amount of time in the wilderness observing the conditions and waiting for the perfect opportunity. He would often wait and contemplate a scene for days before finally pressing the shutter when the moment was right. Cato's work was deeply considered and clearly showed his unique perspective on the natural elements around us.
Cato used symbolism in his work, the consciously constructed image being an interest among 1970s photographers, young and experienced, including his colleague Paul Cox.
The question of the status of photography as an art form was being resolved during this decade; Lynne Warren writes "The creative uses of photography expanded considerably in the 1970s. The medium began to be absorbed into the mainstream art world as conceptual and performance artists started to employ the medium. For body artist Stelarc, photographs were an important creative adjunct to his art events in the 1970s. In a different vein, Jon Rhodes was one of several photographers of the period to address social issues when he used the medium to bring attention to land rights issues for Aboriginal people in the Gove Peninsula in his series, Just Another Sunrise? Others, such as John Cato and Les Walkling, explored the metaphoric potential of photography.
Cinematographer Nino Martinetti, one of Cato's past students, said "Look carefully at John Cato's simple photographs of rocks, branches, trees, bark, sand, water and reflections… is that reality? Yes, but not as many people see it. This is the fine line where the art of photography and reality stand, where the artist captures an emotion for us to share and interpret."
Cato's personal work was described as "a reflection of the psyche, not of light, that allows a consciousness to be present in the figuration of the photographic prints. The personal work is an expression of his self, his experience, his story and his language." Gallery director Rebecca Hossack, who showed his work in her London gallery in 2002, reports that;

Cato is not content to see himself merely as an 'artist' or a 'photographer.' He describes himself – in his beliefs – as an 'animist':
It is a vision that he traces back to the mythology of the Ancient Greeks, but it has interesting resonances, too, with the beliefs of the Australian aboriginals and the practice of their art.

''Earth Song''

Earth Song was Cato's first collection of personal work to be exhibited. This series consisted of 52 colour photographs sequenced in a way that allowed the work to be recognised as individual photographs and as part of an overall concept. Cato's use of musical analogies can be seen in the sequencing of Earth Song, described as using "melodic line and symphonic form as its metaphoric basis".
Earth Song was exhibited as part of the Frontiers exhibition, a 1971 group show at the National Gallery of Victoria of photographers who were exploring the idea of the medium as an art form. Cato's sequence went on to Horsham Art Gallery 14 December 1974 – 30 January 1975 for his first solo exhibition.

''Essay 1: Landscapes in a Figure''

For Cato's first photographic essay described as such, he completed five black and white photo sequences between 1971 and 1979. In each sequence, Cato explored the expression of nature and creation, which he saw as the physical representation of his own life experiences and philosophy.

Series title	Number of photographs	Produced between
Tree – A Journey	18 images	1971–1973
Petroglyphs	14 images	1971–1973
Seawind	14 images	1971–1975
Proteus	18 images	1974–1977
Waterway	16 images	1974–1979

''Essay 2: Figures in a Landscape''

In the 1982 assessment of Age critic Geoff Strong, Essay 2 is the "stuff of social comment" compared to other work, and focuses on "the sublimation of Aboriginal culture by Europeans". This series explores the idea of destruction of culture, spirituality and physicality using duality to represent the idea photographically.

Series title	Number of photographs	Produced between
Alcheringa	11 images	1978–1981
Broken Spears	11 images	1978–1983
Mantracks	22 images	1978–1983

''Double Concerto: An Essay in Fiction''

Double Concerto was Cato's final photo essay. This photo essay was published under the deliberately androgynous 'Everyman' names Pat Noone and Chris Noone, two identities that Cato created to "visualise alternative conditions within himself". Each sequence, one monochrome single images and the other in full colour montages, explored how individual people can witness and experience the world very differently from each other. This series was exhibited as Cato's "farewell show" at Luba Bilu Gallery in Greville St. Prahran on his retirement from teaching.

Series title	Number of photographs	Produced between
Pat Noone	30 images	1984–1990
Chris Noone	11 images	1985–1991

Teaching career

Cato began his teaching career in 1974 at Prahran College of Advanced Education which became known as Melbourne's most innovative art school, where he worked full-time. In 1975 however, government funding ended with Whitlam's dismissal. He took up a position at Roger Hayne's newly established Impact School of Photography before being again offered work at Prahran later in 1975. Until 1979 Cato taught part-time and then took over as Head of Photography when Athol Shmith retired due to ill health in 1980, and remained in the role until the last year of Art & Design at Prahran, 1991 when at 65 he was forced, reluctantly, to retire.
Between 1977 and 1979 Cato also contributed to the foundation of Photography Studies College from the Impact school, and concurrently lectured there until becoming full-time head of the photography department at Prahran. Cato was a passionate and generous teacher and was highly regarded by his students and peers. He described himself as being "duty bound" to share his experience with students and colleagues, and they benefitted from his close knowledge of the history of Australian photography attained as he assisted his father in research for The Story of the Camera in Australia, and in meeting its protagonists.
Many of Cato's past students have gone on to hold well regarded positions in the photography, art and education fields and as Deborah Ely notes "the department produced some of the country's most acclaimed practitioners", including Bill Henson, Carol Jerrems, Steve Lojewski, Rozalind Drummond, Janina Green, Andrew Chapman, Phil Quirk, Jacqueline Mitelman, Polly Borland, Susan Fereday, Robert Ashton, Peter Milne, Leonie Reisberg, Paul Torcello, Stephen Wickham, Kate Williams, daughter of artist Fred Williams, and Christopher Koller among others. Henson, who regarded Cato as "very generous and enthusiastic", was inspired by his use of musical analogies, which Henson later incorporated in his own work. Courtney Pedersen who has since become a senior academic, describes her learning from Cato as 'formative'.
Paul Cox, one of Cato's colleagues at Prahran College of Advanced Education, remarked that while the staff of Cato's department were photographers, none of them were qualified teachers; "Can you imagine that happening today? … At Prahran, teachers and students learnt from each other. It was an exchange."
Cato preferred to use large and medium format cameras in his own work for the higher resolution that they offered and when taking students on excursions, he insisted they use the same instead of 35mm SLR cameras that they more commonly used, so that the more technical view camera would force students to think before they pressed the shutter and pre-visualise their photograph, rather than to 'blaze away' with expendable roll film. Cato strongly believed in photography as a form of individualised expressionism, a view that was shared and supported by Athol Shmith, who was one of the first to teach photography as a creative course in the late 1960s.
Associate Professor Noel Hutchinson dedicated the Prahran Fine Art Graduate Show 1991 catalogue 'in memoriam' to Cato in recognition of his retirement. In the following year Prahran College was subsumed into the Victorian College of the Arts, formerly the National Gallery of Victoria Art School, and Christopher Koller, one of Cato's former students, was made head of its photography department, inheriting his mentor's belief in the importance of conceptualisation and previsualisation in the medium.