Strizic and other post-war immigrant photographers Wolfgang Sievers, Henry Talbot, Richard Woldendorp, Bruno Benini, Margaret Michaelis, Dieter Muller, David Mist and Helmut Newton brought modernism to Australian photography.
He departed Naples on the converted Royal Australian Navy seaplane carrier SS Hellenic Prince, arriving in Melbourne in on Anzac Day, 25 April 1950.
Strizic's good spoken English soon gained him a position as a clerk with the Victorian Railways Reclamation Department,[8] and he resumed his studies in physics part-time at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Strizic bought his first camera, a Diaxette[12][13] and began to photograph his environment, developing a love of strong light which he found abundant under the clear skies of his adopted city.
[16]He enjoyed shooting into the sun contre-jour, and capturing low afternoon side-lighting effects for their high-contrast graphic silhouettes in black and white prints,[17] and that became his signature style for his historically and culturally significant photographs of post-war Melbourne.
He alerts us to the fact Melbourne was undergoing massive change – a process of modernisation"[40]That is the tenor of books of his photography that appeared at this time by Emma Matthews,[41] Judith Buckrich[42] and Rees Barrett[43] Sydney Morning Herald critic Robert McFarlane in 1997 emphasises Strizic's European eye, comparing him to Robert Frank as an "illuminated outsider", one whose images of Australian urban society are often droll, and their design revealing; "...a well-established, unorthodox visual sense, often placing important details near the edges of his pictures.
Strizic also occasionally applies a sense of geometry to his final cornpsitions not dissimilar to that of Mondrian .... early street scenes show the influence of his European vision, often concentrating on small figures juxtaposed against harsh, unfeeling urban settings ...
[47] Strizic used 35mm at a time when medium or large format was the norm for portraiture, and his use of long focal lengths, available light and aura-enhancing shallow depth of field sets the sitter into their environment.
[48] In a 2017 article, Gael Newton, who until 3 years prior was Senior Curator of Australian and International Photography at the National Gallery of Australia, in accounting for his portrait style, draws a link between Strizic's stills photography on Tim Burstall's film 2000 Weeks, his experimentation since the 1960s with a 35mm 'snapshot' aesthetic and his collaboration with Clifton Pugh on Involvement; Strizic's rather cinematic technique saw his sitters glimpsed almost secretly through blurred foreground objects, or against dappled backdrops and into the light, causing flare.
He embedded the person in their environment – artist-craftsman Matcham Skipper for example, is seen through the wrought iron screens he was completing for the entrance to the Australian National University's H. C. Coombs building; and merchant's son turned cattle-breeder Douglas Carnegie is seen at work in the feed shed from the viewpoint of one of his Herefords.
Businessman and philanthropist Sir Ian Potter's head and shoulders are seen at the bottom of the image, against the blurred lights of Times Square, where Strizic was sent to photograph him for the book.
[49]Strizic's output in the genre was considerable; those he photographed included Karl Duldig, Sir Ian Potter, Harold Hughan, Shulim Krimper, Clifford Last, Inge King, Lenton Parr, Fred Williams, Vincent Jomantas, Norma Redpath, John Brack, Ian B. Sprague, Dr Joseph Brown, Noel Counihan, Rudy Komon, T. Zikaras, Arthur Boyd, John Perceval, Rhonda Senbergs, photographer David Roberts, Barry Humphries, Dr Ernest Fooks, his father Prof. Zdenko Strizic, Chief Librarian Colin Alexander McCallum, Marilyn Hill, Dr. E. Graeme Robertson, Dr. Noel Macainsh, Dr. Antal Zador, Geoffrey Dutton, Father Michael Scott, Professor A. R. Chisholm, John Howley, Barry Jones AO, Michael Shannon, Leonard French, Sir Charles Moses, Sir Macfarlane Burnet, Mayor of South Melbourne Doris Catherine Condon, Anne Hall, Asher Bilu, Charles Blackman, Alexander Buzo, Sir Samuel Wadham, Les Gray, Clifton Pugh, Peter O'Shaughnessy, Frank Dalby Davison, David Tolley, Owen Webster, John Olsen, Robin Boyd, Tim Burstall, Matcham Skipper, Professor Richard Downing, Georges Mora, and Tom Sanders.
[2] He began combining, enlarging, cropping and transforming elements from his black and white negatives through montage, then colourising and posterising the monochrome images in the manner associated with Pop Art.
Symbols of urban ugliness such as power poles and billboards were his subject matter and critical target in often apocalyptic imagery intended to provoke a social consciousness.
Yet for photography they are strangely and remarkably interiorized images of a world sensed within as well as perceived without, the product of a superior photographic imagination which remakes the craft and bends it to his constructive purpose.
In the later work this fundament has evolved to a mystic eloquence as he takes us on a metaphysical journey through a fantasia of obscure shapes and semi-identifiable forms submerged in a kind of abstract intensity.
It is a symptom of Western decline such as Spengler identifies with impressionist art: Rembrandt's mighty landscapes (in his portraits) lie esentially [sic] in the universe, Manet's near the railway station.
[58] He was also a collector of significant Australian art himself, and as early as 1974 lent works by John Perceval, whom he photographed 2 years later, to Marianne Baillieu for a show at her gallery Realities.
He presented a public lecture An Experience in Photography, at the University of Melbourne Institute of Education on 20 May 1992[62] Include: The Visual Art/Craft Board's $25,000 Emeritus Fellowship 1993 (also awarded that year to photographer Olive Cotton)[94][95]