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Olive Cotton
A landmark biography of a singular and important Australian photographer, Olive Cotton, by an award-winning writer - beautifully written and deeply moving.
Olive Cotton was one of Australia's pioneering modernist photographers, whose significant talent was recognised as equal to her first husband, the famous photographer Max Dupain. Together, Olive and Max were an Australian version of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera or Ray and Charles Eames, and the photographic work they produced in the 1930s and early 1940s was bold, distinctive and quintessentially Australian.
But in the mid-1940s Olive divorced Max, leaving Sydney to live with her second husband, Ross McInerney, and raise their two children in a tent on a farm near Cowra - later moving to a cottage that had no running water, electricity or telephone for many years. Famously quiet, yet stubbornly determined, Olive continued her photography despite these challenges and the lack of a dark room. But away from the public eye, her work was almost forgotten until a landmark exhibition in Sydney in 1985 shot her back to fame, followed by a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, ensuring her reputation as one of the country's greatest photographers.
Intriguing, moving and powerful, this is Olive's story, but it is also a compelling story of women and creativity - and about what it means for an artist to try to balance the competing demands of their art, work, marriage, children and family.
'Absorbing ... illuminating and moving' Inside Story
Olive Cotton was one of Australia's pioneering modernist photographers, whose significant talent was recognised as equal to her first husband, the famous photographer Max Dupain. Together, Olive and Max were an Australian version of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera or Ray and Charles Eames, and the photographic work they produced in the 1930s and early 1940s was bold, distinctive and quintessentially Australian.
But in the mid-1940s Olive divorced Max, leaving Sydney to live with her second husband, Ross McInerney, and raise their two children in a tent on a farm near Cowra - later moving to a cottage that had no running water, electricity or telephone for many years. Famously quiet, yet stubbornly determined, Olive continued her photography despite these challenges and the lack of a dark room. But away from the public eye, her work was almost forgotten until a landmark exhibition in Sydney in 1985 shot her back to fame, followed by a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, ensuring her reputation as one of the country's greatest photographers.
Intriguing, moving and powerful, this is Olive's story, but it is also a compelling story of women and creativity - and about what it means for an artist to try to balance the competing demands of their art, work, marriage, children and family.
'Absorbing ... illuminating and moving' Inside Story
- GenresNonfictionArtBiography
544 pages, Hardcover
Published June 7, 2022
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82 people want to read
About the author
Helen Ennis
17 books8 followersHelen Ennis is one of Australia’s leading photography curators, historians and writers.
She joined the Department of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia in 1981 and was Curator of International and Australian Photography at the National Gallery of Australia from 1985-92. She has extensive experience as an independent curator and writer specializing in the area of Australian photographic practice.
Her curatorial projects include Mirror with a memory: Photographic portraiture in Australia (National Portrait Gallery, 2000); a retrospective exhibition of Olive Cotton’s photographs (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000); and the two-part exhibition In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s-2000 (National Library of Australia 2003 and 2004). Her exhibition of the work of European émigré photographer Margaret Michaelis was shown at the National Gallery of Australia in 2005.
Helen’s publications include Olive Cotton (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000), Man with a camera: Frank Hurley overseas (National Library of Australia, 2002), Intersections: Photography, history and the National Library of Australia (National Library of Australia, 2004) and the award-winning biography Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography (National Gallery of Australia, 2005). Her book Photography and Australia was published by Reaktion, London, in 2007.
In 2007 she curated Reveries: Photography and Mortality for the National Portrait Gallery and in 2008 curated A Modern Vision: Charles Bayliss, Photographer, 1850-1897 for the National Library of Australia.
Helen is a certified valuer for the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
She is currently Associate Professor, Art Theory, and Graduate Convenor, Research at the Australian National University School of Art
(http://helenennis.com/)
She joined the Department of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia in 1981 and was Curator of International and Australian Photography at the National Gallery of Australia from 1985-92. She has extensive experience as an independent curator and writer specializing in the area of Australian photographic practice.
Her curatorial projects include Mirror with a memory: Photographic portraiture in Australia (National Portrait Gallery, 2000); a retrospective exhibition of Olive Cotton’s photographs (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000); and the two-part exhibition In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s-2000 (National Library of Australia 2003 and 2004). Her exhibition of the work of European émigré photographer Margaret Michaelis was shown at the National Gallery of Australia in 2005.
Helen’s publications include Olive Cotton (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000), Man with a camera: Frank Hurley overseas (National Library of Australia, 2002), Intersections: Photography, history and the National Library of Australia (National Library of Australia, 2004) and the award-winning biography Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography (National Gallery of Australia, 2005). Her book Photography and Australia was published by Reaktion, London, in 2007.
In 2007 she curated Reveries: Photography and Mortality for the National Portrait Gallery and in 2008 curated A Modern Vision: Charles Bayliss, Photographer, 1850-1897 for the National Library of Australia.
Helen is a certified valuer for the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program.
She is currently Associate Professor, Art Theory, and Graduate Convenor, Research at the Australian National University School of Art
(http://helenennis.com/)
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 22, 2021
‘Olive Cotton is recognised as one of Australia’s most important photographers of the modern period.’
Olive Cotton (11 July 1911 – 27 September 2003) was one of Australia’s pioneering modernist photographers. Her obsession with photography began when, aged eleven, she received a Kodak Box Brownie camera. Olive was a childhood friend of Max Dupain’s and in 1934 she joined his fledgling photographic studio, where one of her best-known works, ‘Teacup Ballet’ was photographed circa 1935.
But who was Olive Cotton? What is her story? Apart from her photographs (a retrospective exhibition in Sydney in 1985 drew critical acclaim), Olive left few material traces of her life when she died in 2003. Helen Ennis has pieced together Olive’s story from a variety of sources including her own friendship with the artist, from Olive’s children Sally and Peter McInerney, the private papers of Max Dupain, and the personal items Olive kept in a trunk on the property near Cowra, NSW, where she lived for more than fifty years.
I was intrigued by Olive’s story: a childhood of relative privilege, a university education (at a time when few women attended), a brief marriage to Max Dupain (between 1939 and 1941). We have no insight into why this marriage failed, only that Olive left it and Max was subsequently granted a divorce on the grounds of desertion. Olive later married Ross McInerney and they lived in a tent (without electricity or running water) for several years before buying ‘Spring Forest’ where she lived for the balance of her life.
Around the biographical facts we have about Olive Cotton, Helen Ennis writes of the challenges of trying to balance the competing needs of marriage, children and family with art and the need to earn income.
The book includes several Olive Cotton’s photographs. While I have seen some of these as prints, others were new to me. I would love to see these images reproduced on photographic paper.
I finished the book knowing more about Olive Cotton and with a greater appreciation of her work.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Olive Cotton (11 July 1911 – 27 September 2003) was one of Australia’s pioneering modernist photographers. Her obsession with photography began when, aged eleven, she received a Kodak Box Brownie camera. Olive was a childhood friend of Max Dupain’s and in 1934 she joined his fledgling photographic studio, where one of her best-known works, ‘Teacup Ballet’ was photographed circa 1935.
But who was Olive Cotton? What is her story? Apart from her photographs (a retrospective exhibition in Sydney in 1985 drew critical acclaim), Olive left few material traces of her life when she died in 2003. Helen Ennis has pieced together Olive’s story from a variety of sources including her own friendship with the artist, from Olive’s children Sally and Peter McInerney, the private papers of Max Dupain, and the personal items Olive kept in a trunk on the property near Cowra, NSW, where she lived for more than fifty years.
I was intrigued by Olive’s story: a childhood of relative privilege, a university education (at a time when few women attended), a brief marriage to Max Dupain (between 1939 and 1941). We have no insight into why this marriage failed, only that Olive left it and Max was subsequently granted a divorce on the grounds of desertion. Olive later married Ross McInerney and they lived in a tent (without electricity or running water) for several years before buying ‘Spring Forest’ where she lived for the balance of her life.
Around the biographical facts we have about Olive Cotton, Helen Ennis writes of the challenges of trying to balance the competing needs of marriage, children and family with art and the need to earn income.
The book includes several Olive Cotton’s photographs. While I have seen some of these as prints, others were new to me. I would love to see these images reproduced on photographic paper.
I finished the book knowing more about Olive Cotton and with a greater appreciation of her work.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
May 13, 2021
It is a long time since I read a biography of a photographer that is as compelling, and as touching, as Helen Ennis's 2019 Olive Cotton: a life in photography. In the interest of objectivity, I've avoided others' reviews, though it is impossible to close one's eyes to the awards that the book has already garnered.
Olive Cotton (2011–2003) achieved notability twice in her lifetime, and twice was in charge of her own studio business. What is most poignant about her story, and what is the main substance of this book, is what came between, and after. Her first brush with fame came in 1938, at age 27, which was an auspicious year, in which she outstripped the achievements of many of her fellow exhibitors. No other woman photographer was represented in the two most talked about exhibitions in the country, the Australian Commemorative Salon and the Contemporary Camera Groupe's show. Furthermore, she received substantial international endorsement with her second showing at the London Salon of Photography, which hung both Shasta daisies and Winter willows. Even more significantly, Winter willows was published in The Penrose Annual: Review of the graphic arts, where it was discussed [in an article "Art in Photography"] by Jan Gordon, art critic for the English newspaper The Observer and occasional reviewer for the annual. [an edition notable for its text, jacket and binding by legendary Modernist designer Jan Tschichold].
Ennis's chapter 'Great Possibilities' tracks Cotton's trajectory from her 'first public debut as a photographer' in 1932 at age 21 when her Dusk was displayed in the Interstate Exhibition of Pictorial Photography by the Photographic Society of New South Wales of which she had become a member. The title of the exhibition is apposite; the execution of Dusk adheres to the tradition of Pictorialism which promoted an imitation by photography of traditional painting and printmaking. It was a style that even then was being rejected as anti-photographic by those with modernist ambitions, but Ennis identifies in this "competent, pretty and modest work" Cotton's attachment to the 'key tenets' of Pictorialism in "her entire output...the evocation of beauty, stimulation of the senses and emphasis of the effects of light."
Cotton's rediscovery came not until in 1980, Gael Newton, inaugural photography curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, selected Teacup ballet and Glasses for her book Silver and Grey: Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900–1950. The book was the first to place Olive's work in the historical context of Australian fine art photography, as historians and curators of photography began constructing a lineage of modern photography. She was in prestigious, better-known male company – Cecil Bostock, Harold Cazneaux, Max Dupain, David Moore and Wolfgang Sievers were some of the inclusions.
Barbara Hall and Jenni Mather, pioneering feminist historians of Australian women's photography, staged Australian Women Photographers 1890–1950 at the George Paton Gallery in 1981 with support from its interim director Judy Annear (later senior curator photographs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales), and published a book of that title in 1986, that included a biography of Cotton and again Teacup Ballet, with her Design for a Mural (1942) and Girl with Mirror (1938).
Olive Cotton: a life in photography more than satisfies prevailing curiosity about Cotton's romantic and professional association with the once better known Max Dupain — they were teenage sweethearts who met through their families, hers being the better-heeled, on holidays on the NSW coast where they shared a devotion to photography (increasingly competitive, though sportingly and in mutual admiration, as Ennis reveals). Thus is established a complex relationship between them. After studying at university and rather than going into teaching like her aunts, Cotton "made the first of her overtly adventurous and independent decisions" and in 1933, against her father's wishes, joined Dupain in his 'Bond Street operation'; the studio he had set up with parental support, in Sydney after apprenticeship with Cecil Bostock, detailed in a separate chapter, had run its course.
By then they were not only partners, but lovers. However Ennis points out that Olive did not "enter into it on an equal footing" and "did not take photographs in any professional capacity and instead oversaw the administrative side of things" and eventually some darkroom printing, she notes their "use of the collective pronoun 'we'" in Cotton's later published comments about the business. What drove the 'operation' was Dupain's ambitious modernism, the spirit of which arrives belatedly in Australia through channels like the visits of the Ballet Russes and the Budapest String Quartet (whom Cotton photographed) and that Ennis elucidates in 'Being modern'.
Though emphasising throughout that Cotton rarely gave voice to her aesthetics and opinions on other practitioners, Ennis discovers in unpublished notes, her admiration, actively shared with Dupain, for Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Edward Steichen, Margaret Bourke-White and Bill Brandt which she encountered in imported publications (though Dupain's favourites were the more commercial successes). It is this zeitgeist that inspired Cotton's still life imagery, starting in 1934 with Cardboard design which joined three others in one edition of the handsome Bank Notes staff magazine of the Commonwealth Bank in which Teacup ballet was to appear in 1937.
The title Cardboard design makes it clear that it is an essay in pure, non-applied design, the wellspring of which was the Bauhaus, just then being threatened in Germany with the rise of the National Socialists.
While Ennis pays close attention to the composition and lighting of these photographs, they, and "Glasses" are non-commercial impromptu technical exercises carried out in her own time and through which Cotton learned more sophisticated skills in the use of Max's Thornton Pickard half-plate studio camera, such as the tilting of its lens board and film holder to achieve deep focus.
One episode that conveys Dupain's youthful, even boyish, delight in his fast-advancing ambitions is the arrival of the eminent Russian-born fashion photographer George Hoyingen-Heune, then working for Conde-Nast in New York, who for five days visited Sydney on an Asian cruise in December 1937. He was pictured by Dupain's assistant-cum-junior partner that the business could now afford, Geoffrey Powell. He captures Dupain's rapt attention to the sophisticate master who, resplendent in his deliberately negligee luxurious silk tie, makes a point about lighting in the mounted print they discuss.
A frequent visitor to the studio to fulfil commissions as his services were eagerly sought by the David Jones fashion house, there is intrigue around an exhibition print owned by Max of Olive's Max after surfing that is signed by Hoyingen-Heune "To Max with friendship from George" on the border.
A smaller unsigned print, much darker in the shadows, was printed by Cotton (the later print above duplicates her version) while the negative was retained by Dupain and returned to her by his darkroom assistant only in 1992.
Why the former version is signed for Dupain without reference to Olive and whether the Baron had supervised the printing is not explained by Ennis more fully than did Gael Newton in her 2007 essay published in Antiques & Art. The truth is unavailable. Above all the existence of the signed print confirms Cotton's low status in the studio.
Though further facts have not been uncovered, Ennis does throw some further light on this mystery from her interviews with Sally and Ross, Olive's daughter and second husband, hinting that perhaps the photograph was set up by Max, though one would think its art direction might be Hoyningen-Huene's, especially given his homoerotic male nudes represented as classical, bas-reliefs. The shallow depth of the image is unalike the open spatiality of Cotton's studio work and depictions of figures in the landscape.
Cotton only came to own a professional camera, the Rolleiflex that appears in her hand on the cover of the book, in 1937. Max, in a portrait that is clearly adoring, two years before their marriage, shows her cupping it tenderly in one hand. Apparently unaware of being observed, her dark eyes, haloed by wild, wind-blown hair, search out a subject. They are echoed in the twin lenses of the camera; reflecting skylight their light tone might be read as the white of her shirt, so make the camera appear empty, a receptacle waiting to be filled.
Sandy Cull designs the dust-jacket so that this striking portrait of the book's subject at the apogee of her early career is displayed between truncated letters that would spell her name, but become voguish Deco ornaments in the smoky and neon tones of a cinema foyer of that era. The picture might have been made at the same time that Olive was making pictures of Max photographing fashion models on the sandhills at Cronulla (above). They contain a hint of her fears that his attention was wandering from her to his models, a tendency culminating in his attraction in 1941 to an eighteen-year-old National Art School student Diana Illingworth. He married her in 1944 after his separation from Cotton and a divorce protracted by the requirement of establishing onus of fault, which they agreed would be borne by Olive on the grounds of desertion (she had left in June 1941 to teach at Frensham school 120 km from Sydney). In concluding her chapter 'The bust-up" Ennis quotes long-time friend of the couple Ernest Hyde; "Max was a very demanding person and Olive was a very giving person."
Her watchful eyes of the cover photograph are also indicative of her new concentration in the late 1930s on flower studies and landscapes, and 'Figures in the landscape', the title of a chapter that plays Dupain's famous masculine Sunbaker of about 1938, which in an interview with Ennis he named "an icon of the Australian way of life", against Cotton's Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind and The sleeper, both of female friends, model Jenny Brereton and photographer Olga Sharp, in 1939, the year of their ill-fated wartime marriage.
These are not portraits, as Ennis emphasises, but the imaging of a sensuous empathy for a state of human immersion in the landscape, and while Sunbaker generates such a sensation, she points to its modernist geometry as a point of difference from Olive's softer, psychologically and physically close proximity with her subjects.
In 'The company of women' the reader is given further evidence of this sensitivity in nude photography on the beach commissioned by Joan Baines who contacted her to make pictures she could send to her husband in the AIF in Palestine.
Held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and rarely seen, these are profoundly moving, frank expressions of passion fervently transmitted through Olive's compassionate, complaisant lens.
Four 'Really great years' came for Olive during the war when publisher Ure Smith, a client of the studio, asked her to take it over to produce work for him on a salary and part of profits. The war put an end in 1942 to his publications The Home and Art in Australia that had provided so much income and exposure for Dupain, sufficient to support one other photographer (Damian Parer or Powell) and Olive as assistant. He started another, Australia National Journal and though work was so scarce that Cotton could turn down none, she came into her own, producing some of her best work during this short period 1942 till late 1945 when Max returned from his war service in the camouflage corps.
Ennis provides an example in a complex montage design for a six-foot mural for architect Samuel Lipton, but denies other photo historians' claims that it is a Surrealist work. She does not go so far as to say it shares much with the genre of the 'table-top' that disgraces so many British Journal of Photography annuals of the period. What makes Cotton's a superior example is the fact that the ballet dancers are not china ballerina figurines but skilful, consistently-lit montaged multiple poses of a real model, the photographer's fastidious finesse creating a believable stage-set for fantasy.
Design for a mural (surviving maquette, National Gallery of Australia) appears on a page almost exactly half-way through Olive Cotton: a life in photography, and it marks the end of the story most of us may know about its subject from the 1995 "Olive Cotton, photographer (photographs and captions by Olive Cotton ; with an introduction by Helen Ennis ; and personal memoir by Sally McInerney)".
Details from 'The Dupain diary' and of the 'Divorce' come in the following chapters which unlike most previous, have no accompanying illustration. Ennis keeps each episode to its own short, polished chapter, though (as I am reflecting in this review) not in strict chronological order. Each is given a short, pithy title such as one might give a photograph, and in keeping with that, the picture they include (almost all by Cotton) provides a point of contemplation. Documentary and family photographs are given a quire of glossy pages, while the images in the chapters come to us on the same off-white fibrous paper as the text. Though it may be intended to imitate the photographic papers of the era, and though I am sure McPhersons printers took every care, it sucks the life out of the blacks, making important detail in the less familiar but pivotal images Moths on the windowpane and Light and shade unreadable. You may find yourself, like I did, using phone or tablet while you read, to look up decent online renditions of these great pictures where they are provided by institutional collections, the NLA, NGA, AGNSW, NGV and on the dealer Josef Lebovic's site.
Part Four (there are 6 parts, each with about 12 chapters) starts its first chapter 'Meeting Ross' with a photographic introduction to him on the facing page which brings visceral understanding of his attractiveness to Olive. Where some commentators find the semi-nude Max after surfing an 'erotic', 'swoon-inducing', 'sexually-charged' 'Adonis', this picture, made during the escalating war while Cotton was in the midst of running the Dupain studio is the portrait of ..."a relaxed, fit young man dressed in army uniform...half-smiling...slightly self-conscious but intimate nonetheless" ... "the man who would become her second husband invite[s] comparison with Max after surfing, because of [the portrait's] erotic power. The differences are telling. Olive photographed Ross with no coyness or obfuscation and his eye contact introduces a directness that is absent from the elaborate set-up with Max."
Read the full, illustrated review at https://onthisdateinphotography.com/2...
Olive Cotton (2011–2003) achieved notability twice in her lifetime, and twice was in charge of her own studio business. What is most poignant about her story, and what is the main substance of this book, is what came between, and after. Her first brush with fame came in 1938, at age 27, which was an auspicious year, in which she outstripped the achievements of many of her fellow exhibitors. No other woman photographer was represented in the two most talked about exhibitions in the country, the Australian Commemorative Salon and the Contemporary Camera Groupe's show. Furthermore, she received substantial international endorsement with her second showing at the London Salon of Photography, which hung both Shasta daisies and Winter willows. Even more significantly, Winter willows was published in The Penrose Annual: Review of the graphic arts, where it was discussed [in an article "Art in Photography"] by Jan Gordon, art critic for the English newspaper The Observer and occasional reviewer for the annual. [an edition notable for its text, jacket and binding by legendary Modernist designer Jan Tschichold].
Ennis's chapter 'Great Possibilities' tracks Cotton's trajectory from her 'first public debut as a photographer' in 1932 at age 21 when her Dusk was displayed in the Interstate Exhibition of Pictorial Photography by the Photographic Society of New South Wales of which she had become a member. The title of the exhibition is apposite; the execution of Dusk adheres to the tradition of Pictorialism which promoted an imitation by photography of traditional painting and printmaking. It was a style that even then was being rejected as anti-photographic by those with modernist ambitions, but Ennis identifies in this "competent, pretty and modest work" Cotton's attachment to the 'key tenets' of Pictorialism in "her entire output...the evocation of beauty, stimulation of the senses and emphasis of the effects of light."
Cotton's rediscovery came not until in 1980, Gael Newton, inaugural photography curator at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, selected Teacup ballet and Glasses for her book Silver and Grey: Fifty Years of Australian Photography 1900–1950. The book was the first to place Olive's work in the historical context of Australian fine art photography, as historians and curators of photography began constructing a lineage of modern photography. She was in prestigious, better-known male company – Cecil Bostock, Harold Cazneaux, Max Dupain, David Moore and Wolfgang Sievers were some of the inclusions.
Barbara Hall and Jenni Mather, pioneering feminist historians of Australian women's photography, staged Australian Women Photographers 1890–1950 at the George Paton Gallery in 1981 with support from its interim director Judy Annear (later senior curator photographs at the Art Gallery of New South Wales), and published a book of that title in 1986, that included a biography of Cotton and again Teacup Ballet, with her Design for a Mural (1942) and Girl with Mirror (1938).
Olive Cotton: a life in photography more than satisfies prevailing curiosity about Cotton's romantic and professional association with the once better known Max Dupain — they were teenage sweethearts who met through their families, hers being the better-heeled, on holidays on the NSW coast where they shared a devotion to photography (increasingly competitive, though sportingly and in mutual admiration, as Ennis reveals). Thus is established a complex relationship between them. After studying at university and rather than going into teaching like her aunts, Cotton "made the first of her overtly adventurous and independent decisions" and in 1933, against her father's wishes, joined Dupain in his 'Bond Street operation'; the studio he had set up with parental support, in Sydney after apprenticeship with Cecil Bostock, detailed in a separate chapter, had run its course.
By then they were not only partners, but lovers. However Ennis points out that Olive did not "enter into it on an equal footing" and "did not take photographs in any professional capacity and instead oversaw the administrative side of things" and eventually some darkroom printing, she notes their "use of the collective pronoun 'we'" in Cotton's later published comments about the business. What drove the 'operation' was Dupain's ambitious modernism, the spirit of which arrives belatedly in Australia through channels like the visits of the Ballet Russes and the Budapest String Quartet (whom Cotton photographed) and that Ennis elucidates in 'Being modern'.
Though emphasising throughout that Cotton rarely gave voice to her aesthetics and opinions on other practitioners, Ennis discovers in unpublished notes, her admiration, actively shared with Dupain, for Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, Edward Steichen, Margaret Bourke-White and Bill Brandt which she encountered in imported publications (though Dupain's favourites were the more commercial successes). It is this zeitgeist that inspired Cotton's still life imagery, starting in 1934 with Cardboard design which joined three others in one edition of the handsome Bank Notes staff magazine of the Commonwealth Bank in which Teacup ballet was to appear in 1937.
The title Cardboard design makes it clear that it is an essay in pure, non-applied design, the wellspring of which was the Bauhaus, just then being threatened in Germany with the rise of the National Socialists.
While Ennis pays close attention to the composition and lighting of these photographs, they, and "Glasses" are non-commercial impromptu technical exercises carried out in her own time and through which Cotton learned more sophisticated skills in the use of Max's Thornton Pickard half-plate studio camera, such as the tilting of its lens board and film holder to achieve deep focus.
One episode that conveys Dupain's youthful, even boyish, delight in his fast-advancing ambitions is the arrival of the eminent Russian-born fashion photographer George Hoyingen-Heune, then working for Conde-Nast in New York, who for five days visited Sydney on an Asian cruise in December 1937. He was pictured by Dupain's assistant-cum-junior partner that the business could now afford, Geoffrey Powell. He captures Dupain's rapt attention to the sophisticate master who, resplendent in his deliberately negligee luxurious silk tie, makes a point about lighting in the mounted print they discuss.
A frequent visitor to the studio to fulfil commissions as his services were eagerly sought by the David Jones fashion house, there is intrigue around an exhibition print owned by Max of Olive's Max after surfing that is signed by Hoyingen-Heune "To Max with friendship from George" on the border.
A smaller unsigned print, much darker in the shadows, was printed by Cotton (the later print above duplicates her version) while the negative was retained by Dupain and returned to her by his darkroom assistant only in 1992.
Why the former version is signed for Dupain without reference to Olive and whether the Baron had supervised the printing is not explained by Ennis more fully than did Gael Newton in her 2007 essay published in Antiques & Art. The truth is unavailable. Above all the existence of the signed print confirms Cotton's low status in the studio.
Though further facts have not been uncovered, Ennis does throw some further light on this mystery from her interviews with Sally and Ross, Olive's daughter and second husband, hinting that perhaps the photograph was set up by Max, though one would think its art direction might be Hoyningen-Huene's, especially given his homoerotic male nudes represented as classical, bas-reliefs. The shallow depth of the image is unalike the open spatiality of Cotton's studio work and depictions of figures in the landscape.
Cotton only came to own a professional camera, the Rolleiflex that appears in her hand on the cover of the book, in 1937. Max, in a portrait that is clearly adoring, two years before their marriage, shows her cupping it tenderly in one hand. Apparently unaware of being observed, her dark eyes, haloed by wild, wind-blown hair, search out a subject. They are echoed in the twin lenses of the camera; reflecting skylight their light tone might be read as the white of her shirt, so make the camera appear empty, a receptacle waiting to be filled.
Sandy Cull designs the dust-jacket so that this striking portrait of the book's subject at the apogee of her early career is displayed between truncated letters that would spell her name, but become voguish Deco ornaments in the smoky and neon tones of a cinema foyer of that era. The picture might have been made at the same time that Olive was making pictures of Max photographing fashion models on the sandhills at Cronulla (above). They contain a hint of her fears that his attention was wandering from her to his models, a tendency culminating in his attraction in 1941 to an eighteen-year-old National Art School student Diana Illingworth. He married her in 1944 after his separation from Cotton and a divorce protracted by the requirement of establishing onus of fault, which they agreed would be borne by Olive on the grounds of desertion (she had left in June 1941 to teach at Frensham school 120 km from Sydney). In concluding her chapter 'The bust-up" Ennis quotes long-time friend of the couple Ernest Hyde; "Max was a very demanding person and Olive was a very giving person."
Her watchful eyes of the cover photograph are also indicative of her new concentration in the late 1930s on flower studies and landscapes, and 'Figures in the landscape', the title of a chapter that plays Dupain's famous masculine Sunbaker of about 1938, which in an interview with Ennis he named "an icon of the Australian way of life", against Cotton's Only to taste the warmth, the light, the wind and The sleeper, both of female friends, model Jenny Brereton and photographer Olga Sharp, in 1939, the year of their ill-fated wartime marriage.
These are not portraits, as Ennis emphasises, but the imaging of a sensuous empathy for a state of human immersion in the landscape, and while Sunbaker generates such a sensation, she points to its modernist geometry as a point of difference from Olive's softer, psychologically and physically close proximity with her subjects.
In 'The company of women' the reader is given further evidence of this sensitivity in nude photography on the beach commissioned by Joan Baines who contacted her to make pictures she could send to her husband in the AIF in Palestine.
Held by the Art Gallery of New South Wales and rarely seen, these are profoundly moving, frank expressions of passion fervently transmitted through Olive's compassionate, complaisant lens.
Four 'Really great years' came for Olive during the war when publisher Ure Smith, a client of the studio, asked her to take it over to produce work for him on a salary and part of profits. The war put an end in 1942 to his publications The Home and Art in Australia that had provided so much income and exposure for Dupain, sufficient to support one other photographer (Damian Parer or Powell) and Olive as assistant. He started another, Australia National Journal and though work was so scarce that Cotton could turn down none, she came into her own, producing some of her best work during this short period 1942 till late 1945 when Max returned from his war service in the camouflage corps.
Ennis provides an example in a complex montage design for a six-foot mural for architect Samuel Lipton, but denies other photo historians' claims that it is a Surrealist work. She does not go so far as to say it shares much with the genre of the 'table-top' that disgraces so many British Journal of Photography annuals of the period. What makes Cotton's a superior example is the fact that the ballet dancers are not china ballerina figurines but skilful, consistently-lit montaged multiple poses of a real model, the photographer's fastidious finesse creating a believable stage-set for fantasy.
Design for a mural (surviving maquette, National Gallery of Australia) appears on a page almost exactly half-way through Olive Cotton: a life in photography, and it marks the end of the story most of us may know about its subject from the 1995 "Olive Cotton, photographer (photographs and captions by Olive Cotton ; with an introduction by Helen Ennis ; and personal memoir by Sally McInerney)".
Details from 'The Dupain diary' and of the 'Divorce' come in the following chapters which unlike most previous, have no accompanying illustration. Ennis keeps each episode to its own short, polished chapter, though (as I am reflecting in this review) not in strict chronological order. Each is given a short, pithy title such as one might give a photograph, and in keeping with that, the picture they include (almost all by Cotton) provides a point of contemplation. Documentary and family photographs are given a quire of glossy pages, while the images in the chapters come to us on the same off-white fibrous paper as the text. Though it may be intended to imitate the photographic papers of the era, and though I am sure McPhersons printers took every care, it sucks the life out of the blacks, making important detail in the less familiar but pivotal images Moths on the windowpane and Light and shade unreadable. You may find yourself, like I did, using phone or tablet while you read, to look up decent online renditions of these great pictures where they are provided by institutional collections, the NLA, NGA, AGNSW, NGV and on the dealer Josef Lebovic's site.
Part Four (there are 6 parts, each with about 12 chapters) starts its first chapter 'Meeting Ross' with a photographic introduction to him on the facing page which brings visceral understanding of his attractiveness to Olive. Where some commentators find the semi-nude Max after surfing an 'erotic', 'swoon-inducing', 'sexually-charged' 'Adonis', this picture, made during the escalating war while Cotton was in the midst of running the Dupain studio is the portrait of ..."a relaxed, fit young man dressed in army uniform...half-smiling...slightly self-conscious but intimate nonetheless" ... "the man who would become her second husband invite[s] comparison with Max after surfing, because of [the portrait's] erotic power. The differences are telling. Olive photographed Ross with no coyness or obfuscation and his eye contact introduces a directness that is absent from the elaborate set-up with Max."
Read the full, illustrated review at https://onthisdateinphotography.com/2...
May 9, 2021
I’m not usually a big fan of biographies, but this was an absolute delight to read. Informative and interesting, offering a unique glimpse into this wonderful photographer.
July 12, 2023
Helen Ennis is such a thoughtful, sensitive, and intelligent writer that at so many points during this read I felt genuine frustration and despair that her subject, my fave Strayan photographer, was such a reticent withholding personality who kept and recorded so little of her own thoughts and letters. There are so many times in this book Ennis says things like "this can't be known", "perhaps", "might have", "this is unknown", "there are no records." And too often, as Ennis acknowledges up front, it means that the loud men in Olive Cotton's life dominate the narrative for periods of time. Which annoyed me no end. It also made me realise just how lucky I've been that so many people I've read about, particularly the women, have left such prolific primary material for their biographers.
"No woman has ever written enough" -- bell hooks
Despite limitations, this is such a beautifully written book, particularly in Ennis' analysis and the final chapters. Her love and regard for her subject really comes through then, no more so than when talking about her own efforts to bring about the recognition and appreciation of Olive Cotton's artistry that happened in Olive's own lifetime. Then the narrative really gets energised and it's impossible not to feel the same gladness and excitement, an exuberant kind of relief. I also love that Ennis is quite honest and clear-eyed about her own frequently feminist perspective on the people and relationships in her subject's life. She has a remarkable ability to contextualise and illuminate on so many levels, it feels so enriching. It also helps that Ennis' writing style is fluid and easy to read with no ungainly flourishes or convoluted sentence structure and still full of personality and authenticity.
I could have done without the potted history of WW2 but then again maybe other people appreciated that context and needed it. Apparently not everyone knows as much about WW2 as I do and I'm certainly not one of those (frequently male) lunatics who obsess about gross military campaigns, it startles me every time.
"fecken weirdo(s)" -- sister michael
Really, I'm so grateful this book came out so recently and in electronic form. I fully expected that I'd have to order it in battered paperback from some obscure bookstore prolly in Murrica through Abebooks for some ridiculous price that was more shipping than actual book cost. But no, here it was super quick and easy in flawless formatting and impeccable referencing. Bless.
"No woman has ever written enough" -- bell hooks
Despite limitations, this is such a beautifully written book, particularly in Ennis' analysis and the final chapters. Her love and regard for her subject really comes through then, no more so than when talking about her own efforts to bring about the recognition and appreciation of Olive Cotton's artistry that happened in Olive's own lifetime. Then the narrative really gets energised and it's impossible not to feel the same gladness and excitement, an exuberant kind of relief. I also love that Ennis is quite honest and clear-eyed about her own frequently feminist perspective on the people and relationships in her subject's life. She has a remarkable ability to contextualise and illuminate on so many levels, it feels so enriching. It also helps that Ennis' writing style is fluid and easy to read with no ungainly flourishes or convoluted sentence structure and still full of personality and authenticity.
I could have done without the potted history of WW2 but then again maybe other people appreciated that context and needed it. Apparently not everyone knows as much about WW2 as I do and I'm certainly not one of those (frequently male) lunatics who obsess about gross military campaigns, it startles me every time.
"fecken weirdo(s)" -- sister michael
Really, I'm so grateful this book came out so recently and in electronic form. I fully expected that I'd have to order it in battered paperback from some obscure bookstore prolly in Murrica through Abebooks for some ridiculous price that was more shipping than actual book cost. But no, here it was super quick and easy in flawless formatting and impeccable referencing. Bless.
June 28, 2021
Olive Cotton is my favourite photographer. I discovered her work some years ago now when it was featured in what is still my favourite art exhibition of all time - Sydney Moderns at the Art Gallery of NSW. Cotton’s heyday was the inter-war period where she produced some of the most compelling and beautiful photographs I’ve ever seen. Her strength is in the way she captures and is fascinated by light, and this quality of her work is explored in depth in this book. This biography by Helen Ennis is comprehensive and long (over 500 pages) and the author’s respect and love of the artist shines through. It suffers from a lack of source material for certain periods, not through any fault of the author but through circumstance, the private tendencies of the artist and the times in which the artist lived. The author’s research over many years is impeccable and she does well to make vivid Olive Cotton’s lived experience.
June 28, 2022
Insightful, interesting, informative but also a very human story of the lives of individuals, families and photography.. and then there is Olive... seemingly hard to find from her words but generous with her photography... and she is well worth seeking out.
This is a story that could be of many women of the period, able, educated, talented .. navigating the war and post war expectations and seeking their own paths as well.
The settings are well captured ... the pieces of photographic history are told in detail and ... then there is Olive ... she could see the world from the inside .. and she gave us her photos .. enjoy.
This is a story that could be of many women of the period, able, educated, talented .. navigating the war and post war expectations and seeking their own paths as well.
The settings are well captured ... the pieces of photographic history are told in detail and ... then there is Olive ... she could see the world from the inside .. and she gave us her photos .. enjoy.
December 29, 2020
How wonderful. An exceptional insight into Olive Cotton’s life and work. The descriptions of the chosen images add greatly to our understanding of this woman’s rare gift of capturing the emotion and depth in her subjects.
A real joy.
A real joy.
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