As the team has worked on the Prahran Legacy project we have found that the careers of some of the Prahran alumni fade into obscurity. Gerard Groeneveld is an example. We invite any alumnus who knew him to contact us.

Gerardus Cornelis Groeneveld was born to Elizabeth Maria (née Bep) Kabelorn and Leendert Groeneveld in Rotterdam in the Netherlands on January 25, 1949.

For the 2014 Prahran 40 show at MAGNET Galleries he wrote that “I came to Australia in 1968 and for four and a half years worked for various advertising photographers,” until he married in 1972 in Bairnsdale and that year started his own photographic business, at 22 years old.

The name of his enterprise was Photo Bazaar, and its address was the two-storey shop and dwelling in Sharps Terrace, 344 Punt Road South Yarra, occupied from 1965 by Paul Cox who had settled in Australia after a brief visit two years before and had since taking up his post at the College had moved to Murray St., Prahran. Groeneveld recalled that:

“The most successful aspects of this venture were my winning the Ilford “Life” and The Sun newspaper “Environment” competitions.”

Groeneveld won joint first prize with John Miller, of Auckland, in the “The Best in Australian Professional Photography” section of the “Ilford Professional Photographic Competition”. His prize, a trip around the world worth $1,350 plus $500 to spend, was awarded to him during a dinner in the National Gallery in Melbourne presented by the Premier of Victoria Rupert Hamer. Groeneveld’s entry consisted of photos of children, including an Aboriginal girl.

In conjunction with airline BOAC, Iford (Australia) opened its award in 1970 for Australian and New Zealand professional photographers’ participation in contributing creative photography. The first competition was  “The Age of Aquarius” and this purely creative stimulus drew an immediate response of professional photographers which encouraged Ilford to continue, with the “Encounter’ competition in 1971 and “Concern” in 1972, with prints from Australia and New Zealand photographers. In 1973 the competition theme was “LIFE” with the invitation to,

“interpret life as you see it with all its joys, sorrows, hopes and disappointments, a theme that encompasses the whole spectrum of man’s three score years and ten.”

For the first time the base of the competition was broadened and two around-the-world tickets with BOAC and prize money of $500 was offered to the winning entrant in each of two categories “The Best in Australian Professional Photography” and the “Creative” category. As well as these two major prizes was a further prize of $100 for the best entry received in each category in each State with a special prize for New Zealand and Papua and New Guinea. In all, the prizes totalled $1200.  Well over 1000 prints were judged by a panel of five judges.

Groeneveld’s tightly composed square-format images are serious, sympathetic and compassionate, though not sensationalist, in representing the life struggles of children regarded by society of the time as ‘less fortunate’.

In the subsequent year, an article in the Dutch Australian Weekly of Friday 17 May 1974 (p.3) reported that he had just won another first prize in for a picture on the theme ‘Environment in “The Sun $1,000 Picture Contest.” Gerard won the prize with his entry No Escape showing a cemetery with an oil refinery in the background which he photographed during his holiday in La Perouse in Sydney.

“I decided that photography as a business was both frustrating and unfulfilling and left for a year of travelling in Europe.

“When I returned I was not interested in resuming employment in the photographic industry and so applied to enter Prahran College with the purpose of gaining my Diploma of Art and Design. During this year I have become increasingly involved in colour, until, of late, I have been working solely in this medium. To me a photograph is a personal statement whether it is color or black and white is irrelevant.”

Groenveld joined a group show New Australian Work at The Photographers’ Gallery and Workshop (at the same address in Punt at which he had earlier conducted his photography business) over 20 July – 13 August 1978, alongside Prahran alumni: Bill Henson, Rod McNicol and Geoff Strong, and with Vivienne Hale, David Ellis, Fiona Hall, Ian Cerchi, Stephen Roach, Penny Malone, Peter Charuk, John Adair, Jon Macmichael, Christine Cornish, Frank Busby, Greg Wayn, Rod Trinca, Paul Krieg, , Wayne Fimeri, and Sandy Edwards.

Prior to that, in April/May 1978 Gerard held a solo at Brummels which was reviewed by Beatrice Faust in The Age.

Perhaps as a response to Faust’s review, Groeneveld wrote in 2014:

“I reject the idea that a colour photograph is made through its colour content rather than its subject matter and lament the reluctance with which some photographers seem to approach this medium.”

Groeneveld’s work was amongst those purchased through a $45 000 Philip Morris Grant to represent the generation of photographers who emerged during the mid-1970s. The Philip Morris collection of 826 contemporary Australian photographs which were subsequently acquired by the Australian National Gallery Director James Mollison. ‘Acquisitions’ in the National Gallery’s Annual Report 1982/83 Appendix 11,  p.98, lists other Prahran alumni Robert Ashton, Nigel Clark, Jonathon Corbel, Bill Henson, Julie Higginbotham, Sandra Irvine, Carol Jerrems, Peter Kelly,  Martin Lacis, Peter Leiss, Steven Lojewski, Jenni Mather, Julie Millowick, Glen O’Malley, Philip Quirk, Athol Shmith, Geoff Strong, and Andrew Wittner; and their lecturers John Cato and Paul Cox

As reported in The Age 11 January 2008 Gerard Groeneveld was murdered during a robbery on 7 January 2008 while holidaying in Bali, Indonesia. He was 58 years old.