photographer and dressmaker, was born in Perth; the family first lived in Linden Terrace, then moved to James Street. Hilda attended the Perth Girls’ School but left at the age of fourteen to work in her father’s wood-turning business. At night she studied dressmaking and millinery at Perth Technical College and in 1921 was awarded a teaching cadetship. She taught dressmaking at the College until her retirement in December 1966; in 1948 she produced a series of booklets for the dressmaking course.
Hilda Wright took her first photographs in 1934 while on holiday in NSW; one of her 'pictorial’ images of the Burragorang Valley was published in the Australasian Photo-Review ( AP-R ) in 1938. She had a great love of wildflowers and in 1935 decided to photograph as many of the 6,000-odd species which grow in the West as possible. She joined the WA Camera Club and used a studio set up especially for her spare-time use at the Technical College. To recreate the natural colours of plant specimens—sent to her from all over the state—she used Winsor & Newton artist watercolours to tint her photographs.
In 1937 forty of Wright’s coloured photographs were displayed in the Kodak Gallery, Perth. 125 prints were exhibited in England in 1938: at Hatfield House, the Royal Institute, the Linnaean Society, and at the Royal Horticultural Society where she was awarded a Grenfell medal (silver) for the collection. She was again awarded a Grenfell medal (bronze) in 1950. In August 1939 she was elected an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society for her twelve black-and-white studies of wildflowers, the first WA woman to achieve this honour. (Her work for the award was in black-and-white as the Society did not accept tinted work.)
Wright’s photographs were published in Walkabout and AP-R and exhibited in many galleries, including the Art Gallery of WA (1940), the Kodak Gallery, Sydney (1941), the Royal Photographic Society Annual Exhibition (1942) and the Nature Studies section of the Royal Photographic Society centenary exhibition (1953). Each species had a botanical description provided by the Government Botanist.
Several critics have commended Wright’s work for its combination of botanical detail and artistic skill. The curator at the WA Art Gallery, George Pitt Morison, said that technically the pictures were perfect, well composed and with considerable artistic merit. Governor Sir James Mitchell said that as an 'advertising agent they are likely to do more good than the display of a million bags of wheat or a thousand bales of wool’, while the Government Botanist recognised her work as an important stimulant for the preservation of wildflowers.
Hilda Wright donated her negatives and bequeathed her collection of working and final prints and correspondence to the State Library. Another collection of her fine prints is held at the WA Herbarium.
- Writers:
- Sassoon, Joanna
- Date written:
- 1995
- Last updated:
- 2011
