As a regular participator in national and international exhibitions, Cazneaux was unfaltering in his desire to contribute to the discussion about the photography of his times.

[7] In 1895 Pierce Mott Cazneau, who was by then manager of the studio,[8] married again, to Christina Margaret Jane Harley (12 October 1867 – 17 February 1938).

In 1914 he won Kodak's "Happiest Moment" competition, ostensibly open to amateur and professional alike,[13] and the £100 prize money went toward a deposit for his future home.

[14] This group pledged "to work and to advance pictorial photography and to show our own Australia in terms of sunlight rather than those of greyness and dismal shadows".

[1] The use of light was a defining characteristic of Cazneaux' later work and in 1916 he and others formed the Sydney Camera Circle, establishing the so-called 'Sunshine School' of photography.

The Circle was created for a number of important reasons: it embraced the particularities of Australian light and landscape, and was a move away from the English-inspired darker imagery dominating photographic practice at that time.

The exhibition Harold Cazneaux: artist in photography at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in June and July 2008 included more than 100 of his images, exploring the breadth and depth of his work such as landscape, portraits, the harbour and the city.

Subjects ranged across "all that was fashionable and new" at that time, covering architecture, art and interior design, and also including many portraits of Australians then active in those fields.

One of Cazneaux' most famous images was taken in 1937, of a solitary river red gum tree, near Wilpena Pound in the Flinders Ranges of South Australia.

The title he gave to the photograph was "The Spirit of Endurance", for the qualities he felt epitomised the tree's survival in a harsh environment.