Peter Woodley review of Helen Ennis, Max Dupain: A Portrait

(HarperCollins, 2024), 544 pp., HB $44.99, ISBN 9781460764800

Since the 1980s, the photograph Sunbaker, depicting the anonymous head and bronzed arms of a man lying on a beach, has been perhaps the most recognisable image produced by an Australian photographer. In her biography of its creator, Max Dupain, Helen Ennis quotes a critic who described it as:

the cornerstone of art in this country … a powerful, timeless image that could not have been made elsewhere in the world, and as a representation of the Australian ethos, is unequalled in the visual arts.¹

What that image represents, and its relationship to a national ‘ethos’, has been asserted and then challenged in the years since, but it retains a monolithic status that the artist, Ennis reveals, never sought nor embraced. For all that, until now it has been better known and recognised than the life and character of its creator. Ennis seeks to right that balance with her new biography.

Ennis is widely regarded as a one of Australia’s most eminent photography curators and writers, having been curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia, and director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory, and the Sir William Dobell Chair of Art History, at The Australian National University, where she is professor emeritus. Among her many awards and titles of distinction, she is a fellow of the Australian College of the Humanities. Writing on photography is almost exclusively found in the fine art sections of libraries and bookshops. But Ennis, beyond anyone else in Australia, has inserted photography and photographers into the social history canon, and particularly biography, with Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss and Photography (2005) and, more recently, Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography (2019), which won the 2020 Queensland Literary Award for Non-Fiction, the 2022 Adelaide Festival Award for Non-Fiction, and the 2020 Magarey Medal for Biography. In the Cotton biography, Max Dupain features in a supporting role, central during their youth and few years of marriage, then later as a shadowy, sometimes looming presence, but a character hard to like. In this new work, the first full-length biography of Dupain (Ennis’s entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography was published online in 2020), he takes centre stage.

Maxwell Sydney Dupain (1911–1992) was born in Sydney and, after an indifferent time at Sydney Grammar School, became engrossed with photography after an uncle gave him his first camera in 1924. With the support of photographer Cecil Bostock and publisher Sydney Ure Smith, he built a reputation as a prominent art and fashion photographer. During World War II he advised the army on camouflage technique, afterwards extending his subject matter into the realms of architecture and industry, while continuing to produce his personal, or art, photography. From the 1970s, he was widely recognised as a major figure in Australian art.

Ennis reveals that Dupain conceived of his life as consisting of three distinct spheres: work, the domestic domain and the inner life. With its simplicity and certainty, this framing was consistent with his photographs, which Ennis describes as ‘striking in their self-confidence and freedom from doubt and ambiguousness’ (p. 12). There was an orderliness in his sources of inspiration, guidance and solace. He believed in the superior worth of an aesthetic life, a purity of sensibility in art and an elitism to which only a select few could aspire. He admired the works of Norman Lindsay (particularly Creative Effort: An Essay in Affirmation [1920]), Beethoven, D. H. Lawrence and the English writer Llewelyn Powys.

Digging deeper into the archive, Ennis takes it as her task to disrupt the public image of the self-assured colossus of Australian photography, to investigate what Dupain’s second wife, Dianna, described as his complexity and contradictions. Ennis is comfortable with questions, uncertainty and, sometimes, the opacity of her subject in her quest to disturb ‘the fragile illusion of coherence’ (p. 451). It is evident in her mostly short, staccato chapters (sometimes just a few hundred words) that often end without a resolution, but rather with a suspended chord. Each is more likely to leave an impression than an answer, to add to an accumulating form, a sort of photomontage, building and tracing an arc of Dupain’s life, piece by piece. In her telling, he is most vulnerable and human in his last years: as his capacity to work at the craft that had consumed him and defined him (to himself as well as to a wider public) declines; as he is seen as a grand old man of modernism rather than a contemporary leader in his field; as his quest to keep his three worlds separate frays; as he comes to question the worth of his lifetime’s work, and leaves behind a mess of wrangling over possession of his prodigious body of work.

In her work on Michaelis, Ennis seized the miscellany of unguarded words her subject left behind, revelling in ‘the peculiar kind of power that comes in part from the insistency and immediacy of the present tense’.² With Dupain though, she bemoans the want of intimacy in the written record. His war diary (1942–43) provides perhaps the nearest she has to reflections on his inner life, for a short though intense phase. He wrote a lot in the latter part of his life, but it was mainly as a reviewer of others’ work. Papers from another biographer, Clare Brown, whose project did not eventuate, provide further grist. As in her biography of Cotton, Ennis complements the written record by drawing selectively on Dupain’s huge legacy of images (the State Library of New South Wales holds 250,000 negatives). Throughout the book she sprinkles assessments of individual photographs, charting his journey as an artist, while also piecing together hints of his inner life. In these particularly assured chapters, Ennis is peerless.

A biography cannot cover every aspect of the subject and their times, but I was left wondering how Dupain’s legacy might be framed within the contributions of such a rich cohort of contemporary, creative people who, whether they set out to interpret Australia as a place and a people or not, were nevertheless read as having done so. As well as Dupain, Parer and Cotton, the few years between 1907 and 1918 produced the likes of A. D. Hope, Russel Drysdale, George Johnston, Patrick White, Manning Clark, David Campbell, Judith Wright, Sydney Nolan and others. What, if anything, can be said about Dupain’s place as part of that remarkable generation?

In all though, Ennis succeeds in complicating and disrupting any sense of certainty, assurance or simplicity that might be read into his work. He emerges as obsessed with his craft, shy and passionate, assured and vulnerable, rational and romantic, elitist and affectionate, and more. The book achieves all this while enhancing our understanding of him as one of the most exceptional artists of the twentieth century.

1. 1 Tony Perry, ‘Our Own Rare Iconic Images’, Age, 12 March 1980, 3.

2. 2 Helen Ennis, Margaret Michaelis: Love, Loss and Photography (National Gallery of Australia, c. 2005), 8.