Photography

Three worlds

Item: Max Dupain
Author: Elisa Decourcy

A new biography of Max Dupain

by Elisa deCourcy •

January–February 2025, no. 472

Max Dupain: A portrait by Helen Ennis

Fourth Estate, $55 hb, 532 pp

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Photography

Three worlds

A new biography of Max Dupain

by Elisa deCourcy •

January–February 2025, no. 472

Max Dupain’s photographs are well known to Australian audiences. The monumentally cast upper body of his friend Harold Savage, prostrate on the sand is, as Helen Ennis notes in her new biography of Dupain, the ‘most reproduced photograph in Australian history’. The Sunbaker’s ubiquity has seen it configured, well beyond Dupain’s intention, as ‘an ideal of Australian masculinity’. More recently, it is a photograph that has been restaged by artists as a form of creative and cultural critique.

Elisa deCourcy

Elisa deCourcy is a writer and curator based in Kamberri/Canberra. Between 2020-2023 she was an Australian Research Council Discovery Early Career Fellow (DECRA) in the Centre for Art History and Art Theory at the Australian National University. She has written about photography and colonial art for Australian and International galleries including the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Victoria, alongside contributing to several scholarly journals. She is the author of Early Photography in Colonial Australia, which will be published by Miegunyah/Melbourne University Press in early 2025.