George Chance

George Chance (15 May 1885 – 28 September 1963) was a New Zealand pictorialist photographer active in the early 20th century. He is best known for his photographs of landscape and rural scenes produced during the 1920s and 1930s.

Early life

Chance was born on 15 May 1885, in Liverpool, England. He took his first photographs at the age of 12, with a three-penny pinhole camera. Later, his father would give him a Thornton-Pickard half-plate camera.

Career

Chance emigrated to New Zealand in 1909, by which time he was a qualified optometrist,

Style

Chance was amongst the first photographers to import pictorialism to New Zealand, after being influenced by the work of Alfred Horsley Hinton and the Linked Ring group. prior to the turn of the century, photographers such as the Burton Brothers and George Valentine mainly produced images as souvenirs for the tourist trade or as family keepsakes, not as art objects in their own right.