John Cato

Melissa Miles, writing in 2015 places Cato amongst John Kauffmann, Cecil Bostock, Olive Cotton, Max Dupain, Laurence Le Guay, Richard Waldendorp, David Moore and Grant Mudford who "together represent the broad sweep of abstraction from the steely industrial shapes associated with the straight style to the images aimed at capturing movement and the organic and unruly images derived from nature."

In the 2013 Ballarat International Foto Biennale guide, Cato was described as being "underrated" and "far ahead of his time".

Cato exhibited his work with other photographers in 30 group exhibitions until 2003, the earliest being in 1964 at Blaxland Gallery in Sydney, and in 20 solo exhibitions in Australian and international galleries before his death in 2011. The 1973 Frontiers at the NGV with Stan Ostoja-Kotkowski, Mark Strizic, Peter Medlen and John Wilkins toured to the Australian Embassy in Bangkok, June 27– July 5 and showed at Abraxas Gallery, Manuka, in December 1974 with Sue Ford, Les Gray and Mark Strizic. Cato's first solo exhibition was held at Horsham Regional Art Gallery (Victoria, Australia) in 1975, with subsequent solo exhibitions being held every few years up until 2004.

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;

In a review of Cato's 1997 retrospective at The Photographers' Gallery, The Age reviewer Freda Freiberg noted his achievements;

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.

Cato was honoured with numerous awards including Fellow at the Australian Institute of Professional Photographers (1991) and Honorary Doctor of Arts at RMIT University (1999). He was also awarded two grants, one a Visual Arts Board Travel Grant in 1985 and the other a Research and Development Grant from Victoria College in 1990.

Paul Cox, in whose 1987 film Vincent Cato appears, said the following in an article for The Australian: "He was a dreamer. I always adored him. John had a wonderful heart; he was tender for a man. You know you don't know many people like that." In his autobiography, Cox assures his readers that Cato " will one day be recognised as one of the true greats in the art of photography."

Cato showed again at the Australian Centre for Photography in a group show Time Present and Time Past: Part II in 1984, and Mark Hinderaker, in The Sydney Morning Herald remarked that; "John Cato, Melbourne's master landscape photographer, is represented by two studies of natural form that at first glance seem reminiscent of Edward Weston: in one, tree branches emerge from water and a sandy bottom and, in the other, branches rise from Earth's cracked crust. Together these two remind us of the extreme conditions in nature and of the struggle of organisms to survive; as well, the branches emerge from the planar surfaces like objects (in the photograph's illusion of depth) emerge from the surface of flat paper."

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.

Over his career, Cato was active in national and international networking amongst the photographic and art education fields. He filled a number of honorary roles including one that was a request by Prahran graduates Euan McGillivray, the Curator of Photography at the Science Museum of Victoria, and Matthew Nickson, who worked at the Photography Department at RMIT, to chair the landmark conference 'Working Papers On Photography' (WOPOP) Australian Photography Conference, held at Prahran College of Advanced Education, Melbourne, from 19–21 September 1980.

Ruth Faerber, comparing his work with that of co-exhibitor Laurie Wilson at the same show, noted Cato's "dramatic and expansive themes"; "the sweeping movement of wind, the growth pattern in the cross-section of a tree trunk," and in 1979, of his solo show at AGNSW commented that his "textures of trees. rocks and weathered surfaces take on a graphic surrealist" quality.

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.

Nancy Borlase reviewing Cato's series in Sydney in 1976 found herself;

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.

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.

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.

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.

Paul Cox and Bryan Gracey, colleagues at Prahran College, co-curated the first retrospective of Cato's black and white landscape photographs taken between 1971 and 1991which they exhibited at the 2013 Ballarat International Foto Biennale, both believing that Cato's work deserves to be better recognised. Paul Cox commented; "John will ride a high wave. He belongs in the National Gallery, in the high echelons and I think this is a very wonderful first step."

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 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.

Aside from staging his own exhibitions, Cato was instrumental in the acceptance of photography into the mainstream art establishment. After considerable lobbying by Shmith and others a separate Department of Photography had been established at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne. Cato served on an advisory group formed in 1969 during the establishment of the gallery's new Photography Department and oversaw the appointment of the first curator of photography in Australia, Jennie Boddington in 1972.

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.

When the MoMA 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.

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.

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.

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.

John Chester Cato (2 November 1926 – 30 January 2011) 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.

John Chester Cato was born on November 2, 1926, in Hobart, Tasmania, to Mary Booth and John (Jack) Cato.