Going to the Max: Sydney’s ultimate Dupain exhibition should make anyone swoon

Australia’s best-known modernist photographer Max Dupain was famous for his idealised images of bronzed youths, fashion models, nude shots of photographer Olive Cotton (his first wife) and the sails of Jorn Utzon’s Opera House.

His favourite image, though, was far from glam. It was Meat Queue , women lining up to buy meat during rationing after World War II, said State Library of NSW curator Avryl Whitnall.

As for his most famous photograph taken in 1938, The Sunbaker , which resurged in popularity in the 1970s and 1980s to decorate walls of beach shacks and homes across Australia, Dupain hated it.

“That bloody Sunbaker. Don’t they think I took anything else?” he said.

Whitnall knows he did. She spent five years trawling through his entire negative archive of more than 270,000 images, nearly all digitised and now together for the first time in the library’s collection, and his papers and albums.

The exhibition, Definitive Dupain, includes more than 200 images, punctuated by quotes from Dupain and others about his work.

“Bottom line, there’s something for everyone here. If you don’t find something that makes you swoon, well, maybe you don’t like photography,” Whitnall said.

Opening at the State Library of NSW on Monday, August 24, it includes many photos either new or rarely seen. They include shots from Paris where Dupain documented the opening of the Harry Seidler-designed Australian embassy; his first published works in Home magazine, 1934, including two nudes, and experimental works using sunlight to develop an image.

It includes evidence of Dupain’s lesser-known passion for photographing nature – shells, trees, and flowers, from monstera deliciosa to eucalyptus.

Whitnall calls a sultry self-portrait from 1936 Max du Babe . Another is an older Dupain reflected in his car’s bumper bar in 1956. Four years before he died, his self-portrait includes his Hasselblad camera.

Whitnall wonders, too, about Dupain’s photograph called Death by Candlelight , taken a few years before he died. A dead magpie lies across an article in The Sydney Morning Herald titled Short Shrift.

Whether he was the best of the best of Australia’s 20th century photographers is still being debated, but Dupain is the only person in the library’s history to be celebrated with seven exhibitions.

State Librarian Dr Caroline Butler-Bowdon said Dupain’s negative archive forms the nation’s most historically important photographic record of the mid- to late-20th century.

Said to be one of Australia’s most outstanding photographers, and the best architectural photographer Opera House architect Utzon knew, Dupain was modest.