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. In 1901, the young Chance joined Houghtons Limited, a photography supplier, as a showroom demonstrator. His next job was as a photography tutor for The London Stereoscopic Company of Regent Street, around 1904. In this position he taught photography to a number of notable figures of the time, including Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Francis Greville, 5th Earl of Warwick, Prince Vajiravudh (then the Crown Prince of Siam), Lord Curzon, Lord Roberts and W.S. Gilbert. In 1905, Chance was the photographer on an ill-fated expedition to recover the Cocos Island Treasure, which apparently led to him being present for an unspecified "revolution" in Ecuador as well as an earthquake, events which supplied him with a supply of adventurous anecdotes later in his life.