Foreword

It seems that an inescapable bond exists between the people who make photographs and the images they create. One informs the other. This idea holds good across the spectrum of photography. Whether we look at a discarded 'Photome' booth picture and involve ourselves in the frustrated self-vision of the most amateur of photographers, or take an extract from the life's work of an acknowledged master, the camera can be transcended. That bond can dissolve the mechanism of photography.

I write this looking at a photograph by Max Dupain: Sunbaker, 1937. It has hung on my wall for two years. At every glance, and I must have made thousands, it speaks of the perception possessed by the world's most gifted photographers. In its modulation of light and tone, taut formality, rigorous geometry and energy, I recall Max Dupain, a man I met in 1977. That meeting gave me considerable pleasure. Not only did I see a great many fine photographs, I also encountered a man of affability, hospitality and culture. Those qualities I find revealed in his pictures. Revealed, too, is the constant curiosity that has accompanied fifty years of image-making.

When I was introduced to Max, in the company of Athol Shmith, I was able to witness two of Australia's great photographers reminisce on their personal discoveries. The talk was of Weston, Man Ray, Cartier-Bresson. What was not discussed, and this was typical of their modesty and self-effacement, were their individual contributions to a young medium in a young country.

In Max's case I was able to see this in the work he showed me later—a group of fine pictures that began with a gentle study of rippling water and bending reeds from 1928 and ended up with a stark composition of stockyard poles made in northern Queensland in 1977. The first was work from an unusually gifted teenager—with sensitivity it joined delicacy and evocation to a surprisingly dynamic visual sense. It was a subtle play of point and counterpoint. And the last, made by an older, more sure-footed man, came as a fresh and shocking delineation of the medium's power in bringing abstraction to realism. As an exploration of spatial harmonics it offered gratifying surprises with intense light and the props of rural everyday reconstructed in tight camera-frame to portray the essence of things.

In my view only the most energetic of human beings can spend fifty years making pictures. To maintain an output as rich and varied as that of Max Dupain while tying each image to the next, and to sustain such a quality of vision and constancy of exploration, set him in a class apart. This is a salutary lesson when I realise that the sunbaker in the print I stare at so often would now be old enough to be my father.

Through the past decade, which has witnessed a burgeoning interest in photography, I have grown to know and love the works of many fine photographers. Max Dupain, of course, is among them—high on the list. But what if this fashion had not come to pass? What if that handful of image-makers who cared so passionately through the years had never developed? In that event I would probably have remained ignorant of the wealth of creative energy locked in their output. But Max Dupain would still have made his pictures. He makes them for himself, not for an admiring group of acolytes. He makes them, in simple terms, because he has to. And I thank him for sharing them.

Max Dupain 1976 - David Moore

An appreciation

Exploration of the beauty and drama of light has enticed many a photographer on physical voyages of discovery. Some travel relentlessly to reach new shores; others are content to examine and re-examine the environment and society into which they were born.

Max Dupain belongs to the second category for his experience of the world has been confined largely to Australia. The only important exceptions to this were his war service in New Guinea during 1943 and a three-week visit to Paris in 1978. Surprising though this may be in a world circled by an ever-thickening web of jet routes, supported by airline discounts and group travel, Dupain has always been an explorer. Often a lone explorer, he has seldom been lonely, for the camera is the ever-present companion of the sensitive photographer.

Perhaps it is incidental that his physical roaming has allowed him to punctuate his body of work with images from Alice Springs, Weipa or Port Arthur, for most of his photographs have been produced from within a tightly confined geographic perimeter which has Sydney as its centre. One feels he has been more concerned to develop as a sensitive matchmaker in the tender courtship, and occasional violent marriage, of light and film than to depend on exotic subject matter for impact.

A Giacometti shadow falling across sand on a remote beach or the all-revealing document of housewives in a postwar meat queue have provided Dupain with material from which to distil the essential. Nothing is included unnecessarily and no detail of importance is omitted. A rigorous discipline of selection has honed the statements to a precise edge. These, and others, are compelling images. Once seen they are not easily forgotten. One has the feeling that Dupain is never in doubt within himself about any particular subject and how best to express it.

The nude torso in plate 22 is stated with such strength that it virtually challenges the viewer. Valkyrian overtones resonate through this picture. Then consider for a moment the extraordinary blackboy trees advancing across arid land in plate 54. Primitive vegetation, hostile environment, knife-edge horizon. Sand grinds flesh inside dry boots. Clouds never come but flies do—endlessly until dark. An evocative sense of the outback is infused into the photograph. Therein lies the ability of the man—the creative photographer—to understand the fundamental meaning of things and, through the camera, convey this understanding to the viewer.

There is a subtle 'signature' about Dupain's photographs that is at the same time memorable and self-effacing. Few photographers have managed such a satisfactory blending of personal vision with absolute statements of physical facts. After reacting to the presented image one realises that this must be a Dupain photograph. The priorities are seldom, if everr reversed.

But for all this there are few pictures in the bulging files of Dupain's studio which pose intellectual questions for the viewer. His photography is deeply concerned with emotional response. It relies on visual truths combined with an aesthetic delight in the beauty of form.

It would be difficult to find a Dupain photograph which did not instantly reveal the reason for taking it. Always there is a content which is justified and always there is a penetration of the subject which invites the personal participation of the viewer. His pictures are far removed from the work emanating from many younger photographers who diligently examine the ambiguous edges of our world in an attempt to question our established sense of understanding.

Recognition must surely be made of this area of enquiry, although Dupain's patience with some photography being produced today is occasionally limited. He is concerned by an apparent lack of content stemming from an over-refined, esoteric attitude which, he considers, fails in its attempt to communicate. In this belief he does not overlook the importance of sociological minutiae, which has been shown by many highly respected photographers to be of value, but he will not countenance images purporting to be photographs which are in fact vacant observations of trivia.

The development of Max Dupain's 'track' through the half century since he took his first photographs is not easy to trace. His restless eye has found fascination in an astonishing variety of subject matter. In this respect he is a sincere professional and has always regarded new problems as welcome challenges to be faced and overcome.

Regardless of the variety of his scope, mention should be made of the important place industry has continually held in his storehouse of visual building blocks. Within the romantic landscapes of his early work comes a prophetic pointer to his industrial love affair in the stone quarry in plate 5, dated 1931. An awareness of a new world of form is glimpsed. This is confirmed with confident authority in the silos picture of 1935 (pi 10), As if waking from a gentle dream he has suddenly become aware of the power and excitement of the industrial scene.

Dupain at this time turned a radical corner which precluded any return to the inbred attitudes of the Pictorial salon school of photography where the 'line of grace' and soft focus lenses were cherished.

As he developed, Dupain continued to include romanticism in his images but it was an honest, clean romanticism which respected the mechanics of his chosen instrument of expression. Nevertheless he always believed in a strong relationship between the machines of our industrial landscape and the machine he could so comfortably hold in his hand. Always he has maintained that the camera can interpret the meaning of industry better than any other visual medium of expression.

Another exercise which has imparted an influence on his photography has been the demanding discipline of the portrait. Human form is present in many of his pictures but the examination of personality has occupied a great deal of his productive life.

Many of Dupain's portraits are of artists—musicians, painters, writers—and there is a fascinating shift of attitude apparent if one compares pictures made in the 1930s with those from the 1950s onwards. Norman Lindsay 1936 (pi 40) and Helene Kirsova 1938 (pi 41) appear to carry the Dupain stamp. Walter Gropius 1954 (pi 42) and Lloyd Rees 1979 (pi 66) do not. Why is this so? It is difficult to be certain. Perhaps it is a simple matter of realising that Dupain's later maturity has permitted him to photograph with more of the child's joy of vision. Or there may be a far more complex and intriguing answer. Nevertheless, there is one picture within this book which confounds analysis and at the same time provides the bridge between these two attitudes.

The double portrait of Mr and Mrs Larry Adler 1938 (pi 43) is an assured Dupain photograph yet it is almost as free and spontaneous as a snapshot. Whilst much work dating from the pre-war years was unique and visionary, the adventure of the Adler portrait is remarkable even when viewed by today's criteria. It rests just as happily alongside Lloyd Rees as it does with Norman Lindsay.

During the 1930s and 1940s Dupain established himself as possibly the major photographer working in Australia who was concerned to produce his own personal statement. Subtly influenced by the work of Brassai in Paris and Brandt in London he made a notable contribution to the tradition of Australian photography. In doing so he accepted the responsibilities for progressive photographic thought which previously had been shouldered by his highly respected senior, Harold Cazneaux. Both men devoted much of their time to examining the subject of the city and, although their approaches varied considerably, it is now clear that Dupain's work led directly forward from that of Cazneaux.

At this time there existed in Australia an eager, if limited, public which readily appreciated the work of Dupain. Full credit for this must be given to the publisher Sydney Ure Smith who gave generous space to these photographs in the pages of his journals, The Home and Art in Australia.

Additionally, Ure Smith published in 1948 a limited edition monograph entitled Max Dupain—Photographs which remains an important document on the personal work of a contemporary Australian photographer. It was a daring gamble which, even today, few publishers in Australia are prepared to take. Ure Smith in all probability did not count the cost. It was in the nature of the man to do it simply because he felt it should be done.

This present volume on the work of Max Dupain goes a good deal further in the examination of the man's work. Thirty-two years have produced an enormous stockpile of new pictures for here is a photographer who continues to drive himself as diligently—even remorselessly—as he ever did in younger years.

Dupain lives with his wife Diana in a tree-shaded house in the Sydney suburb of Castlecrag with the sparkling water of Middle Harbour below. Light fills the air as it is reflected up into the building. It is a light which has entranced Dupain since his youth. It is a light which will produce many more photographs in the years to come. One becomes impatient to witness what gifts may lie ahead in his visual contribution to our lives.