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Professional photographer, was born in the 1870s. He became a postcard and view photographer in Katoomba, NSW, producing nearly 100 view books, many being souvenirs for royal visits, anniversaries or occasions such as the Katoomba Girls’ Physical Culture Club’s Display in the Town Hall . Infatuated with the Blue Mountains, he took too many photographs and most were kitsch, but due to his interest in the aesthetic and symbolic effects of clouds and mist he also took a few extraordinary images. His passion was expressed in his most personal book, The Cloud (Katoomba, 1914), in which he arranges cloudy photographs in an elaborate tableau around Shelley’s poem – using 'Photographs guaranteed absolutely free from double photographic printing or faking in any manner’. They included Three Sisters, Between the Clouds, Echo Point, Katoomba , the source of a petit-point tapestry by artist Narelle Jubelin.
This is then followed by a reproduction and discussion of his most famous photo, War Clouds and a personal testimony headed 'Is There a God? Clouds in my life, and how they were dispelled’, which describes a vision of Christ that came to him on the Narrow Neck Plateau in the Blue Mountains. He was so entranced he forgot to take a photo, but compensated in March 1909 when he took War Clouds , a natural image of a sky containing three black clouds in which he discerned the forms of the German Eagle with a woman (Belgium as it turned out) clutched in its talons, the 'British Lion’ and 'Russia’s representative, the Bear’. Realising that this symbolised a world catastrophe, he sent prints to various world leaders. His remarkable career inspired Delia Falconer’s first novel, The Service of Clouds (1990s), in which Phillips becomes Harry Kitchings.