MAXWELL SPENCER DUPAIN



DOB 22nd April 1911
27th July 1992



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

STILL LIFE
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th November 1935  Page 70 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

NUDE
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th November 1935  Page 71 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

NUDE STUDY
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th November 1935  Page 72 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

SHADOWS
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th November 1935  Page 73 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

MASK EFFECT
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th November 1935  Page 74 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

PHOTOGRAPHIC STUDY
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th November 1935  Page 75 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

SKETCH AT SUNRISE
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




SIX STUDIES OF MEMBERS OF COL. DE BASIL’S RUSSIAN BALLET




15th February 1937  Page 44 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

IRINA BONDIREVA IN "MIDNIGHT SUN"
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th February 1937  Page 45 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

TAMARA TCHINAROVA IN "PRESAGES”
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th February 1937  Page 46 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

SONIA WOIZIKOVSKA IN "PRESAGES”
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th February 1937  Page 47 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

NINA YOUCHKEVITCH IN "AURORA’S WEDDING”
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th February 1937  Page 48 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

IRINA VASSILIEVA IN "SYLPHIDES”
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN




15th February 1937  Page 49 - ART IN AUSTRALIA

TINA SCARPA IN "CARNAVAL”
PHOTOGRAPH BY
MAX DUPAIN






This article by HELEN ENNIS and was published:

in the AUSTRALIAN DICTIONARY OF BIOGRAPHY, 2021

ONLINE in 2020


MAXWELL SPENCER DUPAIN

DOB 22nd April 1911
27th July 1992


Maxwell Spencer Dupain, photographer, was born on 22nd April 1911 at Ashfield, Sydney, only child of Sydney-born parents George Zephirin Dupain, physical culture expert, and his wife Thomasine Jane (Ena), née Farnsworth. George, a pioneer in the physical fitness movement in Australia, had founded the Dupain Institute of Physical Education, Sydney, in 1900, and wrote extensively on physical education, diet, and nutrition. As a boy Max worked out at his father’s gymnasium. He later attributed his Romantic nature to the combination of his father’s French and his mother’s Irish ancestry. The family lived on Parramatta Road, close to other members of the Dupain and Farnsworth families. Max accompanied his mother to Church of England services at St John’s Church, Ashfield, but as an adult was not religious, attributing his views to his father’s scientific rationalism.

Educated at Ashfield Preparatory and Sydney Grammar schools, Dupain did not thrive academically, and did not complete the Leaving certificate. He enjoyed athletics, rowing, and the arts. In 1924 his uncle Clarence Farnsworth, an amateur photographer, gave him his first camera. His creativity in photography was recognized at Grammar through the award of the Carter memorial prize for the productive use of spare time in 1928. That year he joined the Photographic Society of New South Wales and presented his early works in the prevailing soft-focus Pictorialist style in the society’s exhibitions. His contribution to the society’s 1932 Interstate Exhibition of Pictorial Photography attracted praise from the eminent photographer and critic Harold Cazneaux.

Leaving school in 1930, Dupain was apprenticed to the photographer Cecil Bostock. His three years with Bostock gave him a rigorous technical training. At the same time, he attended evening art classes at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School and East Sydney Technical College, where he developed basic skills in drawing. In 1934, with financial support from his family, he opened a modest studio with a shared darkroom at 24 Bond Street. The timing was auspicious as Australia was recovering from the Depression and the demand for advertising, society, and celebrity photography was growing. Following his move to larger premises in the same building, he employed Geoffrey Powell (1937–38) and Damien Parer (1938–39). The photographer Olive Edith Cotton joined his studio in 1934 as the general assistant. Dupain had met her in 1924 through his father’s business partnership with her uncle Max Cotton; the couple married on 29th April 1939 in a Methodist service at her home; they separated in August 1941, and divorced in February 1944.

The patronage of the publisher Sydney Ure Smith was crucial in establishing Dupain’s career. In 1935 Ure Smith featured his work in Art in Australia and invited him to review J.T. Scoby’s book on the international surrealist photographer Man Ray for The Home magazine. By the late 1930s Dupain was recognized as a leading modernist photographer whose work responded to the realities of contemporary life. He experimented with different techniques, including photomontage and solarisation, and developed a style characterized by a dramatic use of light. Throughout his career his preferred medium was black and white photography. His subject matter was diverse, encompassing still lifes, landscapes, and cityscapes, and he was one of the first Australian photographers to focus on studies of the nude, both male and female. Ure Smith would later publish the first monograph on Dupain in 1948.

Dupain’s passionate advocacy of modernist photography extended beyond his own commercial and personal work. From the late 1930s he played an important role as a commentator in photography magazines and later as photography critic for the Sydney Morning Herald. He was a founding member of the Contemporary Camera Groupe in 1938, formed to counter the prevailing conservatism of Australian photography. His Romantic outlook was shaped by his self-declared heroes in literature, music, and the arts: Beethoven, Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, Llewellyn Powys, and the Australian artist Norman Lindsay, whose book Creative Effort was particularly influential. His pantheon of photographers included Man Ray, George Hoyningen-Huene (whom he met in Sydney in 1937), and Margaret Bourke-White.

In 1941 the Dupain studio joined the photo-engraving firm Hartland and Hyde Pty Ltd and relocated to Clarence Street. From 1942 to 1945 Dupain was employed in a civilian capacity as a camoufleur with the Royal Australian Air Force in Darwin, New Guinea, and Goodenough Island, off the north-east coast of Papua, taking photographs that revealed the effectiveness of different kinds of camouflage. Olive Cotton ran the studio in his absence. He joined the Commonwealth Department of Information in late 1945 and traveled around Australia taking photographs for the government’s publicity campaign to attract migrants to Australia.

On 25 November 1946 Dupain married Diana Palmer Illingworth, a status clerk, at the District Registrar’s Office, Chatswood; she later became a social worker. From 1953 until his death they lived at The Scarp, Castlecrag, in a house designed by the modernist Australian architect Arthur Baldwinson, and surrounded by a native garden cultivated by Dupain. In the postwar period his orientation in photography changed and he championed a documentary approach which involved working outdoors, using sunlight, and celebrating spontaneity and naturalness. Although he disdained the artificiality of the studio, he continued working in advertising but increasingly focused on architectural and industrial photography. He established close working relationships with eminent architects including Samuel Lipson, John D. Moore, Walter Bunning, and, in later years, Sydney Ancher and especially Harry Seidler. A reluctant traveler, he made only one trip to Europe in his lifetime, in 1978, to photograph the Australian Embassy in Paris designed by Seidler.

During the 1970s Dupain emerged as a key figure in the Australian art photography movement following his retrospective exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, which introduced his now best-known photograph, Sunbaker, to the public. This image encapsulated his interest in body culture and embrace of the outdoors: it came to be identified with a characteristically Australian way of life. Numerous shows and publications followed, along with representation in all major public collections in Australia, including the National Gallery of Australia. He had formed Max Dupain and Associates in 1971, initially located at Artarmon, where colleagues included Jill White and Eric Sierins, and continued working until 1991.

Described by his second wife as a ‘complex character', Dupain was not a social person and was intense, single-minded, and disciplined. His approach to photography was predicated on his belief that the viewer must be involved both emotionally and intellectually, and he devoted his life to achieving excellence in his practice. Becoming an honorary fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects in 1980, he was appointed OBE in 1981 and AC (Companion of the Order)in 1992. He died on 27th July 1992 at Castlecrag, survived by his wife and their daughter and son, and was cremated. After his death his archive was divided into two: the art and personal negatives remained with his family and the commercial negatives were consolidated into the Max Dupain Exhibition Negative Archive, now in the collection of the State Library of New South Wales.




AUSTRALIA SQUARE
Max Dupain



MORNING RUSH HOUR, SYDNEY HARBOUR BRIDGE 1938
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1938



MEAT QUEUE, SYDNEY
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1946


Meat queue, Sydney was one in a series of pictures Sydney photographer Max Dupain undertook for the Department of Information. When interviewed by curator Helen Ennis in 1991 Dupain said:

“We were doing a story on queues after the war. They were all over the place, queues for buses, vegetables, fruit. I just happened to come across this butcher shop in Pitt Street, I think it was. Here they were all lined up and I went around it, took a number of pictures, ultimately ending up with this sort of architectural approach with four of five females all dressed in black with black hats, not looking too happy about the world. Suddenly one of them breaks the queue when I’m focused up all ready to go, pure luck".

The solidity of the linear figures taken from mid distance beneath a meat coupon scale which will weigh a proportion of meat with the allowable coupons democratizes the women. The picture is given a sudden focus as the central figure decides to move from the queue and unwanted contact is made with the woman ahead. Described as both a documentary photograph, but not necessarily a social comment, the economic food-rationing of postwar Australia is shown in this clear modernist image of black-and-white shapes in shallow space. Form rather than content defines this image. The central figure in a lighter colored coat is balanced on either side by the darker coats as the black hats, which make a wave along the horizontal, parallel the line of meat hooks.

1. Ennis, H. 1991, Max Dupain: photographs, Australian National Gallery, Canberra p. 18.


MORNING COMMUTERS, THE KABU, CIRCULAR QUAY
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1938



TRAM ABSTRACTION
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1930



RUSH HOUR, KINGS CROSS
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1938



NUDE FIGURE WITH TROMBONE SHADOW
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1930's



RHYTHMIC FORM
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1935



NIGHT WITH HER TRAIN OF STARS AND HER GIFT OF SLEEP
Max Dupain
Gelatin silver photograph 1936-37