Harald Emil Axel Poignant was born in Leeds Yorkshire on 12 December 1906, to Axel Jonas and Annie Lake Poignant. His mother was English, and his father was born in Sweden but would become a naturalised British subject. By 1911 the family were in Harrogate where Axel went to school at Grosvenor House. Their staff included a foot-man, a cook and a nurse, making a rather formal home life for Axel and his two younger sisters.
With the outbreak of World War 1, his father joined the British Army, in the West Yorkshire Regiment. He served with distinction and in 1919, the now Lieutenant-Colonel Poignant MC. OBE., decided to move his wife, son and surviving daughter to Sweden. Once there he reverted back to being a Swedish citizen.
With his education disrupted, young Axel was initially sent to Gotland, a Swedish offshore island, then he spent a year as a sea cadet on a Swedish windjammer. He was in mainland Sweden from late 1922 to the end of 1925, doing office work. However, with strains developing between father and son, it was time for him to move on. That opportunity came as his Swedish Aunt Maria in Harrogate urged him back to UK, and told him about the Dreadnought Scheme.
On the 27 May 1926, Axel Poignant emigrated from Liverpool, under the Dreadnought Scheme, on the SS Pakeha. There were 47 other boys in their group on the ship which arrived in Sydney on 17 July. He was sent to Scheyville for farm training, and then placed on a farm at Coolamon, near Junee in southern New South Wales.
Axel's experience of rural life was far from easy. His second year (1927) saw the start of a serious drought across Australia, and towards the end of winter, it hit the Riverina area of southern New South Wales suddenly and hard. Stock losses and crop failures were wide spread, and Axel's health broke down. After 18 months of rural work, he headed back to Sydney. But there was no work there, so back to the bush, where even casual work was not to be found. Still unemployed in 1928, Axel Poignant was camped in the French's Forest above Dee Why in Sydney. He was able to make some money by picking wildflowers illegally, and taking them to the florists in the city's Rowe Street. This weekly trip enabled him to borrow books from the Municipal Library, and widen his knowledge of Australian life.
Axel began attending Theosophical Society lectures. At one, a fainting fit which was probably due to his hunger, triggered a closer association with that community. His friends there looked out for him, and he eventually moved into the society's community house in Mosman. While there, Axel met and, in early 1930, married Sandra Chase. He also gained employment with the Electrolux Company, then at Gestetner Office Machines (predecessors of photocopying machines). Document reproduction with a half-tone stencil process stirred up his photographic interest.
Right from his early teens, Axel had an interest in photography. Just prior to his trip to Australia, he had acquired a vest-pocket camera which he used extensively on the voyage out, and during his training at Scheyville. His emerging talent as a storyteller was shown by the albums he made with his pictures. Thus in 1930, Axel Poignant was soon taking home portraits, developing them in the community's laundry, and adding to his meagre salary.
Later that year, Axel and his wife returned to live in Perth, Western Australia, in her mother's house. He was able to continue with his photography working from home, specialising in portraits, most often of children. As a specialty, he made available to his customers, a small booklet containing an assembly of the proof prints.
During the early 1930s, Axel Poignant was experimenting with his photographic style, moving away from a romantic or idealized depiction, preferring a picture where the content showed its reality, where fresh aspects of the real world and contemporary life could be seen. Significant technical development had been happening with cameras. Axel was able to expand his techniques when he acquired (second-hand) a standard 35mm Leica camera.
The camera acquisition was one benefit from working for Western Mining Company in its aerial survey assembly team, from late 1933 to September 1934. The other benefits were the additional income, and a special appreciation of the aerial viewpoint. Then followed his photographing of Karri logging at Pemberton, of Kalgoorlie mines, aerial views of the Duke of Gloucester's arrival in Perth and Anzac Day Dawn Service, where Poignant's style and the choice of angles proved to be innovative.
It is beyond our scope to detail Axel Poignant's photographic work over the ensuing years. However, it is important to note that, in 1942, he began his extensive photographic documentation of the outback and Aboriginal people, travelling the Canning Stock Route by camel.
By the beginning of 1942, Poignant tried to enlist in the Royal Australian Air Force, no doubt inspired by his aerial photography work. He was blocked by his tangled citizenship. Born, he thought, a British citizen in 1906, he came to Australia as a Dreadnought Boy with British nationality, in 1926 - NO, that was a mistake. When his father reverted to Swedish nationality Axel Poignant, as a minor at that time, became Swedish also, automatically losing British nationality.
Divorced in 1941, Poignant was naturalised in July 1942 and married to Ruth Petterson a few weeks later. He enlisted on 29 March 1943, in the Australian Army, and was attached to the Land Headquarters Electrical and Mechanical Engineering School, at Ingleburn in Sydney. He was discharged in September 1945, to work on Ealing Studio's film The Overlanders, as a cameraman with Director Harry Watt. These months in the Northern Territory galvanised his interest in the Aboriginal people, prompting him to research more about them. He became cameraman for the Australian Government film project, Namatjira The Painter. The three months that he and the crew spent with Albert Namatjira and his family, began to help him see first-hand the bond between the Aborigines and their land.
During the next decade, Axel Poignant was mainly working as a freelance photographer, returning a number of times to the Northern Territory, as well as travelling widely throughout Australia. In 1952, he learned that the government planned to set up a station on the Liverpool River in Arnhem Land. As this would dramatically change life for the Aboriginals there, he spent three months in the North, camped by the Liverpool River. He made thousands of photographs of many aspects of daily and ceremonial life, and about 2,000 of these are held in The National Library of Australia, in Canberra.
Poignant's photographs were exhibited over the years. In 1941 he exhibited jointly with Hal Missingham in Perth, and in 1955 in Sydney, in the Six Photographers exhibition. His work was included in the 1980 Observers of Man exhibition in London. A retrospective exhibition was held later in 1982, at the Art Gallery of NSW.
He was widowered in 1953, and subsequently married Roslyn Izatt from the government film unit. A family reunion in 1956 took them to Europe, where they made their base in London. Axel Poignant did freelance photographic journalism for the BBC and various newspapers, and returned to Australia from time to time; his travels also took him to the Pacific Islands and Papua New Guinea.
Poignant published a number of books in his time, the first being Bush Animals of Australia in 1949. He produced story books for children such as Piccadilly Walkabout in 1957, and a number of others in the 1960s and 70s, where he put his photo-storytelling skills to good use.
Survived by his wife, Axel Poignant died in London, on 5 February 1986, aged 79 years.
This Dreadnought Boy, the self-taught photographer and skilled photo-storyteller, opened the window on Aboriginal life for many of us, showed us ordinary, and unusual, aspects of life in Australia and elsewhere. He expressed himself through images which, ultimately, have been able to speak for themselves.
