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.

Elisa deCourcy reviews ‘Max Dupain: A portrait’ by Helen Ennis

January–February 2025, no. 472 • 18 December 2024

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’. Mor ... (read more)

The Business of Photography | Chau Chak Wing Museum

ABR Arts • 11 March 2021

Few exhibitions about photography are premised on something other than the resulting image. The Business of Photography: The 19th century studio in NSW at Sydney University’s new Chau Chak Wing Museum makes an intriguing step back from the cased daguerreotypes, carte de visite, and collectable stereo cards of the nineteenth century. It invites visitors into the places of these images’ latency ... (read more)