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Research in Progress Pages - watch this space for updates
An Introduction
The Contemporary Camera Groupe (the spelling with a final “e” was deliberate) was a short-lived Sydney association of twelve photographers and graphic artists formed in late 1938 at the instigation of Max Dupain.
It held a single exhibition, at the Exhibition Gallery of David Jones’s Market Street store, which opened on Monday 21 November 1938.
It is generally regarded as the earliest Australian photography exhibition to present a predominantly modernist approach, including abstraction, montage and surrealist themes, although it also included a selective showing by older pictorialists.
The Groupe did not exhibit again. This can be explained by the coming of World War II in 1939, but also by the possibility that the make-up of the group would probably not have survived as a coherent group beyond this first co-operative exhibition.
(see link below for list of participants) |
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Olive Cotton, 1937, Plum Blossums
Collection Queensland Art Gallery |
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During 1938, there was a controversy played out in the media relating to another exhibition that pre-dated the Camera Groupe's exhibition later in 1938. In March - April 1938, the Photographic Society of NSW with the Sydney Camera Circle and the Professional Photographers Association of NSW staged the Commemorative Salon of Photography for Australia’s 150th anniversary, promoted as the finest exhibition of modern photography ever shown in Australia.
Max Dupain attacked it in letters to the Sydney Morning Herald (28 March and 7 April 1938), criticising the judges for favouring traditional European-style work over genuinely contemporary photography. Harold Cazneaux and others replied in defence of pictorialism. (see link below for some of the letters)
Later that year Dupain formed the Contemporary Camera Groupe in protest at the continued dominance of pictorialism. Sources place the formation in November 1938, when Dupain and Olive Cotton invited Laurence Le Guay to join them.
Max Dupain was the instigator, who also wrote the manifesto printed in the catalogue. Cecil Bostock, Dupain’s former employer and teacher, was instrumental in forming the Groupe, which was designed to unite artists and photographers. Bostock designed the catalogue and is credited with adding the “e” to “Groupe”. He died of cancer in 1939. Olive Cotton was co-inviter (with Dupain) of Le Guay and was the only woman in the Groupe.
Dupain’s catalogue text echoed The Linked Ring in its phrasing, calling for an alliance between photography and the other arts and for individuality alongside respect for the “masters”. Its best-known line: “We hate the cliche, and would drive a wedge between stagnant orthodoxy and original thought of the living moment.”
A pre-exhibition advertisement invited the public to “Witness this Exhibition, prophetic in its modernity”.
The Sydney Morning Herald review of 22 November 1938 was broadly respectful. It found Dupain’s work sincere and in places distinguished, praised Bostock’s witty observational studies, welcomed Le Guay’s new restraint, and noted the contrast provided by the painted panels of Annand and Dodd. Its main reservation concerned Cazneaux’s printing technique.
return to main page for Contemporary Camera Groupe
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