In this episode of Biographers of Conversation, the multi-award winning author and art historian Helen Ennis chats with Dr Gabriella Kelly-Davies about her choices while crafting Max Dupain: A Portrait.
A Critically-Informed Biography
‘Max Dupain: A Portrait’ is the new landmark biography of Australia’s most iconic photographer from Helen Ennis, an acclaimed curator and award-winning author of ‘Olive Cotton; A Life in Photography’.
Max Dupain
Max Dupain: A Portrait is the first biography of the legendary photographer Max Dupain, the most influential Australian photographer of the twentieth century. Max Dupain (1911-1992) was a significant cultural figure in Australia, and at the forefront of the visual arts in a career spanning more than 50 years.
Max Dupain (left) and friend Clarence Glassock, 1929
National Library of Australia
Max championed modern photography and a distinctive Australian approach. During his career, he created countless iconic images that have passed into our national imagination, including the acclaimed ‘Sunbaker’ in 1937. Max Dupain: A Portrait explores the man behind the lens, chronicling his artistic journey, contributions to the field of photography, and the personal experiences that shaped his vision.
Max Dupain ‘Sunbaker’, 1937
National Gallery of Victoria
In this biography, Helen meticulously uncovers the layers of Dupain’s life from his early years in Sydney to his rise as a pivotal figure in Australian art. She paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of Max, exploring his relationships, professional achievements, personal struggles and triumphs. Her narrative captures the essence of his character and personality, revealing the motivations that drove his creative pursuits.
A Polyvocal Narrative
‘The floater’, 1939
Max Dupain
National Gallery of Australia
In 2019, Ennis published an award-winning biography of Olive Cotton, a childhood friend of Max Dupain whom she who married in 1939. Although Olive was an accomplished photographer in her own right, her career was overshadowed by that of her husband.
‘Olive Cotton, holding a camera’, c.1937-38
Mitchell Library
State Library of New South Wales
The profound influence of women in Dupain’s life emerged as a recurring theme in Ennis’s biography. Women played a pivotal role in shaping his artistic vision and supporting his career. Their contributions, often overlooked, were crucial to his success.
‘Ena Dupain drying dishes’, June 1943
Mitchell Library
State Library of New South Wales
‘Max Dupain and Jill White in the studio’, c 1973
Photographer unknown
Collection of Jill White
‘Diana Illingworth on her wedding day to Max Dupain’, 27 November 1944
Collection of Danina Dupain Anderson
Max Dupain has traditionally been seen in one-dimensional, limited and limiting terms - as exceptional, as super masculine, as an Australian hero. But Helen Ennis’s biography approaches him as a complex and contradictory figure who, despite the apparent certitude of his photographic style, was filled with self-doubt and anxiety. A Romantic and a rationalist, Max Dupain struggled with the intensity of his emotions and reactions. Although he longed for simplicity in his art and life, he found it challenging to attain. He never wanted to be ordinary.
Writing Like a Novelist
Examining the sources of his creativity - literature, art, music - alongside his approaches to masculinity, love, the body, war, and nature, Max Dupain: A Portrait reveals a driven artist, one whose relationship to his work has been described as ‘ferocious and ‘painful to watch’. Photographer David Moore, a long-term friend, said Max ‘needed to photograph like he needed to breathe. It was part of him. It gave him his drive and force in life.’
John Gollings, Max Dupain, 1984
Courtesy of John Gollings
Ennis’s biography of Dupain is an authoritative and psychologically acute exploration of one of Australia’s most influential photographers. Her portrait stands as a testament to the enduring impact of Max Dupain’s photography and the complexity of his character. She portrayed his artistic brilliance, a mastery of light and form that captured the essence of Australian identity. Max Dupain’s ability to distil everyday scenes into timeless compositions, from the sun-drenched beaches of Bondi to the stark landscapes of the outback, remains unparalleled.
Authorial Voice
However, Helen Ennis reveals that beneath the surface of this celebrated artist lay a more complex and often contradictory personality. She revealed Max Dupain’s perfectionism and his relentless pursuit of the perfect image. This drive, while fuelling his artistic success, also led to periods of intense self-criticism and even despair. He grappled with anxieties about his relevance, particularly in his later years, questioning his place in a rapidly evolving photographic landscape.
Max Dupain’s Changing Persona
Monstera deliciosa, 1970
Courtesy of Jill White
Through Max Dupain: A Portrait, Helen Ennis painted an intimate portrait of Max Dupain. Her biography of him celebrates his iconic imagery and provides a subtle understanding of the man behind the camera: his struggles, triumphs and enduring legacy. It serves as a reminder that even the most celebrated artists are human, grappling with self-doubt, navigating personal relationships, and striving for meaning in their creative endeavours.
Praise for Max Dupain: A Portrait
The Best Australian Books of 2024
Susan Wyndham, The Guardian
The dust jacket of this handsome biography, showing a charismatic young Dupain, peels away to expose the eminent Australian photographer’s iconic 1930s image, Sunbaker. Inside, a more complex man and career are revealed in lucid prose by Ennis, a leading historian of photography… she finds Dupain (1911-1992) was a creative, driven photographer shaped by self-doubt, war, beach culture, modernism, literature, music and commerce. Ennis dug deeply into his archive and sets his first biography against absorbing history and examination of famous and unknown images.
‘A different kind of Australian masculinity: the fractured life of influential photographer Max Dupain’
Martyn Jolly The Conversation
… this book is not about icons, or fame or national identity. It’s about the dreams, loves, desires, doubts, angers, fears, and creative yearnings of an Australian man – not the quintessential or typical Australian man some may (mistakenly) take Sunbaker to represent, but a man whose fractured life, presented here through a series of beautifully nuanced readings of some of his photographs … tells us something relevant about Australia and Australian masculinity.
This revelatory book is a portrait of a man who thought he was different to the rest of us but was then troubled by the self-doubt that perhaps he wasn’t after all.
It’s a portrait of man driven to elevate himself through so much hard creative work that it destroyed the other parts of his life that made him what he was in the first place – some of his relationships, some of his openness, some of his optimism.
Nigel Featherstone, The Guardian
In this thoughtfully structured, readable and in many ways moving biography, Dupain ultimately comes across as someone who spoke against his myth, but also traded on it until the end. … Together with Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography, Ennis’s biography of Dupain forms a major study of what is arguably the most significant period of Australian photographic practice. Eschewing gossip and speculation, Max Dupain: A Portrait focuses on the work, which, when considered as a whole, is diverse, brave, not always successful, but yearns for something that might be considered the truth.
Max Dupain: A Portrait,
Non-fiction Book of the Week, Sydney Morning Herald
Max Dupain: Media Coverage and Interviews
Book launch – Max Dupain: A Portrait by Helen Ennis, National Library of Australia, 28 November 2024. Helen is in conversation with Alex Sloan.
Helen Ennis, ‘Max Dupain unafraid of death, but unprepared for ageing’, The Australian, 9 November 2024.
Helen Ennis, ‘The phoenix’, Extract from Max Dupain: A Portrait, Inside Story, 22 November 2023.
Other Writing on Max Dupain by Helen Ennis
‘Max Dupain’s dilemmas’, Australian Book Review, November 2021. This essay was Commended in the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. The podcast of the essay, read by Helen, can be heard here.
Helen Ennis, ‘Dupain, Maxwell Spencer (Max) (1911–1992)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published online 2020. This article was published in hardcopy in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, (ANU Press), 2021.
Helen Ennis, then Curator of Photography, curated the exhibition ‘Max Dupain: Photographs at the National Gallery of Australia’, 16 November 1991 to 27 January 1991. It was accompanied by a 28-page exhibition catalogue, Max Dupain: Photographs (Australian National Gallery, 1991) which includes a Biographical Essay and an Interview with Max Dupain that Helen recorded at his home in Castlecrag, Sydney.
Both texts are available on the NGA website.
Helen Ennis is an eminent photography curator, historian and writer. She joined the Department of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra in 1981 and was Curator of International and Australian Photography from 1985-92. Helen has extensive experience as an independent curator and writer specialising in Australian photographic practice and biography. She lectured in Art Theory at the Australian National University School of Art & Design from 1996 to 2018 and became a professor in 2014. She was Director of the Centre of Art History and Art Theory and the Sir William Dobell Chair of Art History from 2014 to 2018.
Major curatorial projects since 2000 include Mirror with a memory: Photographic portraiture in Australia (National Portrait Gallery, 2000); a retrospective exhibition of Olive Cotton’s photographs (Art Gallery of NSW, 2000); In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s-2000 (National Library of Australia, 2003 and 2004); a survey exhibition of the photography of European émigré Margaret Michaelis (National Gallery of Australia, 2005) Reveries: Photography and Mortality (NPG, 2007); A Modern Vision: Charles Bayliss, Photographer, 1850-1897 (NLA, 2008) and Things: Photographing the constructed world (NLA, 2012).
Helen Ennis writes extensively, and her books include Intersections: Photography, History and the National Library of Australia (2004); Reveries: Photography and Mortality and Photography and Australia, both 2007; and Wolfgang Sievers, 2011. Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography (2005) was awarded the Victorian Premier’s Non-fiction prize in 2006 and Olive Cotton: A life in photography (Fourth Estate, 2019) was awarded the 2020 Magarey Medal for Biography,the Queensland Literary Awards Non-fiction prize and the Adelaide Festival Award for Non-Fiction.