Maxwell Dupain

MAXWELL SPENCER DUPAIN

DOB 22nd April 1911
27th July 1992

1929 joined the NSW Photographic Society.
1938 was a founding member of the Contemporary Camera Groupe but it’s potential was stymied by the war.
1938 Dupain instigated the Contemporary Camera Groupe, partly in protest at the continued dominance of pictorialism, which was by then a reactionary style which paid scant attention to the new world or modern photography.
1938 married Olive Cotton.
1947 married Diana Illingworth, with whom he had a daughter, Danina and son, Rex
1961 EFIAP - Excellence Federation International De L'Art Photographique
1982 awarded the Commonwealth Medal for Services to Professional Photography
1982 Order of the British Empire (OBE)
1983 awarded a life membership with the Royal Australian Institute of Architects
1992, 26th January, awarded Companion of the Order of Australia (AC).

Saturday 22nd June 1929
The Sydney Morning Herald (NSW) - Page 11

CONTENTMENT
A tiny home in the west,
Rain on the window at night,
The wind whistling thro' eaves,
A lamp with a glowing light,
A red hearth of burning leaves,
Memories —
Content.
MAX DUPAIN

Friday 31st July 1992 Page 4 - The Canberra Times (ACT)

DUPAIN, PHOTOGRAPHER, DIES

Max Dupain, whose photos became icons of the Australian way of life, has died aged 81. His death three days ago was kept secret by friends and he was buried on Wednesday at a quiet ceremony in Sydney, NSW Art Gallery director Edmund Capon said. Mr Capon described him as the father of modern photography in Australia and a man of great initiative and drive. The Sunbaker, his image of a young man's water-sprayed head resting on crossed arms in the sand, is etched into Australia's visual memory. The black and white photo was taken in 1937, but remains a current image — appearing most recently on the cover of journalist John Pilger's book The Secret Country.

Dupain had been ill for some time and had stopped working a few months ago. Dupain was part of the new generation of modern photographers who rejected the romanticism of the pictorialist movement that dominated amateur photography in the 1930s and 1940s. He was more interested in industrial landscapes.

He exhibited in the Photographic Society of New South Wales's exhibition of 1928, as a 17-year-old schoolboy and joined a Sydney studio as an apprentice two years later. By the early 1930s his more abstract style was drawing criticism as "unpicturesque". He set up his own studio in Bond Street, Sydney, in 1934, publishing soon after a series of photos from inner-city Pyrmont that focused on telegraph poles and car wheels rather than human elements. Dupain joined the 1930s vogue for surrealism.

In 1938 he and 11 other artists formed the Contemporary Camera Groupe and held an exhibition in December of that year. Dupain showed surrealist portraits and nudes.

During World War 11, Dupain served with the camouflage unit in New Guinea, transferring to the Department of Information in 1945 — a position that allowed him to develop his ideas about photo-documentary.

15th November 1935 Page 40 - Art in Australia

Max Dupain, is a young photographer who was born in 1911 at Ashfield, Sydney. When he left the Sydney Grammar School in 1930 he began an apprenticeship with C.W. Bostock, the well-known Sydney photographer, and he also attended the Sydney Art School under Mr. Julian Ashton.

He believes in effort and production, and he thinks that with years of experiment the photograph will completely assert itself.

Men like Anton Bruheui, Hoyningen-Huene, Man Ray, Steichen are the creative photographers of the 20th century.

Max Dupain thinks photography in Australia is in much need of a leader who has a potent influence, with a capacity similar to that of Steiglitz or D.O. Hill. We must believe in photography, he says, as a new medium, with its mechanistic and not naturalistic forms. G.H. Saxon Mills, writing in Modern Photography, 1931, says: "It is part and parcel of the terrific and thrilling panorama opening out before us to-day of clean concrete buildings and steel radio masts and the wings of the air liner. But its beauty is only for those who themselves are aware of the 'Zeitgeist' — who belong consciously and proudly to their age and have not their eyes forever fixed wistfully on the past.

15th November 1935 Page 69 - ART IN AUSTRALIA