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Peter Dombrovskis was born in 1945 to Latvian parents Karl and Adele. In 1950 Dombrovskis and his mother left Europe for Sydney. The following year, they travelled to Hobart which would become an important place for Dombrovskis and where he would spend most of his adult life. They briefly lived at Aldridge Lodge in Hobart, the home of Joan Allport, before settling in Fern Tree, a suburb situated on the shoulder of Mount Wellington. Adele possessed a great passion for the wild and the two spent much of Dombrovskis’ childhood walking in the Tasmanian woods and rainforest gullies.

Dombrovskis was influenced by the Lithuanian-Australian photographer and conservationist Olegas Truchanas whom he met when he was about seventeen years old. Truchanas introduced Dombrovskis to many outdoor pursuits including skiing and canoeing. They developed a close friendship and Dombrovskis is noted for describing himself as Truchanas’ disciple. Truchanas died in 1972 and at this point Dombrovskis asserted his intentions to carry on from where his friend left off – to finish the work Truchanas had started.

Dombrovskis’ first photographic publication was a calendar of images of urban, rural and wilderness areas of Tasmania for the year 1973 which sold out upon its release. The following year he married Gabrielle and they had five children together: Olivia, Nicholas, David, Timothy and Monica.

In 1977 he published his first calendar featuring purely wilderness photographs and his first book, The Quiet Land. The same year, Dombrovskis founded the company, West Wind Press. In 1979 he began to work with Robert Poole, a designer and printer from Melbourne, who would continue to play an active role in Dombrovskis’ wilderness photography publications.

Throughout his life Dombrovskis was intimately involved with the natural environment, not only through photography, but also through exploration, this included walking and canoeing along the rivers he photographed. He was an environmentalist and a conservationist and was deeply saddened by the onset of logging in Tasmania’s ancient forests and the destruction of natural areas through damming projects (Dombrovskis, 1998). He was heavily involved with the 1982 No Dams movement led by the Tasmanian Wilderness Society and Bob Brown (inaugural Parliamentary Leader of the Australian Greens Party). His photograph Morning Mist, Rock Island Bend, Franklin River (1979), of the forested banks of Newland Cascades, appeared in a number of newspapers, including the Sydney Morning Herald and the Age (Melbourne), in the form of a full-page, colour advertisement accompanied by the question, “Could you vote for a party that would destroy this?” This image, like many of Dombrovskis’ photographs, served to drawn attention to wilderness regions of Tasmania under threat.

Dombrovskis married his second wife, Liz, in 1987. She had two children from a previous marriage: Ben and Anna.

Dombrovskis was given a 35mm Zeiss camera by Adele at age six; he then moved to a Rolleiflex SL66 and, eventually, to the Linhof Master Technika 5×4 inch flatbed field camera with which he took most of his mature photographs. The practice of using a camera such as the Linhof was similar to the unwieldy process of nineteenth-century photography; it was large and cumbersome and had to be mounted on a tripod in order to take a photograph. Dombrovskis restricted himself to the use of only three lenses: a 90mm Nikkor F4.5, a 150mm Schneider Symar-S and a 300mm Nikkor MF9. He used the medium of colour photography throughout his career.

Dombrovskis’ images possess grandeur and a monumental quality. There is an echo of the sublime character of nature throughout his work, fuelled by his belief in the necessity of preserving the wild world for posterity. Bob Brown has referred to Dombrovskis’ photography as an art born out of a sense of ethics. Dombrovskis’ photography was influenced by other artists, including American environmental photographers Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston and Eliot Porter.

On 28 March 1996, while photographing the Western Arthur Range in Southwest Tasmania, Dombrovskis died of heart failure at the age of fifty-one. After his death, Dombrovskis’ second wife, Liz Dombrovskis, continued to publish his work through the West Wind Press until her retirement in July 2009.

In February 2003 Dombrovskis received the posthumous honour of being inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City, USA. He is the first Australian to receive this award.

Dombrovskis’ work is included in collections of the National Library of Australia, the National Gallery of Australia, the Australian Heritage Commission, the National Gallery of Victoria, Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens and the Wilderness Gallery, as well as in many private collections.

Writers:

Linn, Kathleen Note:

Date written:

2009

Last updated:

2009

Status:

peer-reviewed