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Helen Ennis interviews Max Dupain

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Max Dupain spoke with Helen Ennis at his home in Castlecrag, Sydney, on 1 August 1991. Helen's questions (in italics) and Max Dupain's answers follow.

How did you come to photography with such assurance?

The answer was and probably still is that I couldn't do anything else — as simple as that. I had no scholastic background at all but I latched onto photography immediately. The intrigue of producing a light picture the way we had to in the 1920s and earlier was so fascinating that it has stayed with me all my life.

You have mentioned that you loved rowing and that athletics were important to you when you were at school. Could you have pursued those interests?

I don't think so, I think that might have been a follow-on from my father's physical education situation. He was the doyen of physical education in Australia, had a marvellous gymnasium which I used to attend, and physical health and all that applied to it was his paramount interest in those days. I followed through with school sport, I rowed a lot and later when we came to live at Castlecrag on the water I had a scull, which I paddled for fifteen to twenty years.

Did this awareness of physical health mean that you were really conscious of nutrition?

Oh yes, for sure. I'm just trying to think of the phraseology. At that time we didn't have a science of dietetics but it was a case of eating what we knew was best for us — carbohydrates, mineral salts, fats, vitamins and so on — and it still is. That's the physical bit and all we can do is hope for the best, It may work out or it may not. So far it's been pretty good — there's not much longer to go.

Was your mother interested in that kind of lifestyle too?

She was very devoted to my father and gave him all the support that a wife would be expected to give; she naturally followed his dietetic procedure. They lived a very simple life. I was the only child. My father had an enormous library, probably 10,000 books, of which I have many in my own library. He had a laboratory where he used to make chemical experiments and he became a Fellow Storm at Toowoon Bay. 1950s, printed 1990 of the Chemical Society in London when I was a small boy, much to the ecstasy of the family generally. This was due to his analysis of various aspects of the human body in chemical terms — and it was great to have, especially in those days.

As a family, what did you do in your free time?

We were a very simple family, we didn't have all the sophistications of life that we have today. Occasionally we'd indulge in extraneous entertainment like a picture show, visits to the art gallery and not much else. Comparatively speaking, a simple life which is something I hanker after today.

What about music, were your parents interested in music?

Yes they were. We had a marvellous Edison gramophone and my father was interested, primarily because his father played the piano. We had all the classics, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, and the rest of them. I'd say every day we had music of some sort at some time.

Is there anything else you want to say about your family or your childhood?

No, but I can't overstress the simplicity of it. No complications as far as society was concerned and life was lived as it more or less happened to be.

Did you go to the beach house at Newport very often?

Yes, we did. The house at Newport was built when I was about ten. A timber house, very elemental. It's still there, it's had additions to it and some renovations. I can remember the weekends were sacrosanct and more often than not they were spent at the Newport cottage. We lived at Ashfield and we used to take a bus, tram, the boat, the tram and the bus to Newport. It took three hours and we considered this a long time but well worth it. I can remember when I was a small boy arriving there just before lunch, slipping into a costume and diving down the cliff into the surf on a beautiful sunny day. I wish to hell I could do that now.

During your apprenticeship with Cecil Bostock you studied drawing and painting at night classes at Julian Ashton Art School and then at East Sydney Technical College. You have said that you gained your 'basic art wisdom' from Henry Gibbons. What did that mean?

The basic bit is that the foreground is the most important part of the picture. I was interested in landscape painting at the time and one of the reasons I went there was to learn to more or less draw and claim what wisdom I could from the atmosphere, the teaching, the talking and so on. There was a group of us there, about four or five of us, old friends, one architect, one builder, a secretary and maybe a couple of others. We used to go to coffee after art classes two or three times a week and argue, and this was marvellous. My greatest friend at the time was Chris van Dyke who was a builder, terribly interested in architecture, and his favourite exclamation was ‘you're only young once, make the most of it!' Well, you know that was just part and parcel of the development cycle. I was into photography and I never let up on that and I'm still that way.

How did you keep yourself so well informed about photography?

Books like Das Deutsche Lichtbild were available in Sydney and we used to subscribe to them. I think we got them through Swains bookshop primarily. We just used to dwell on them; when Das Deutsche Lichtbild arrived on the scene we'd just hoe into it to see what they were thinking on the other side of the world. This was great, you know Ultimately it wore out and you developed your own scene, your own philosophy, your own thinking. Now you don't give a stuff what happens overseas because you've got your own thing to do, naturally enough.

You have been described as 'the quintessential Australian photographer'. What do you think people mean by that?

I don't know and I'm not quite sure that they know what they mean either. It could mean that I have a very specific devotion to my country, which is Australia. I find that my whole life, if it's going to be of any consequence in photography, has to be devoted to that place where I have been born and reared, and worked, thought, philosophized and made pictures to the best of my ability. And that's all I need.

When people talk about your work being really Australian', I guess they might mean its subject matter, but do you think of it more as your approach?

I do. It's my philosophy primarily which is directed in no uncertain terms towards my own country.

Would that be one of the reasons why you have made only one trip to Europe [in 1978]?

Yes, could be.

Did you have the desire to go earlier?

No, I had no desire to go at all. When one is in business and there is no alternative, you just have to abide by the situation and do it.

So your trip to Europe and Bangkok [c. 1980] obviously didn't fill you with the desire to pack your bags and travel regularly?

No, no. The skittering around the periphery doesn't interest me one little bit. I like to involve myself in, maybe, a small area geographically and work it out, as simple as that.

Have you felt restricted in getting a lot of art education and art appreciation from reproductions in books?

No, no. I think you take them for what they're worth. They are stimulants up to a point and you just accept them as that. But the real thing has got to be the thought they promote within. Without that you might as well just take up photography as most people do, as a technical procedure. That's nowhere near enough, for me anyhow.

Over the years do you think your inspiration for photography has come from photography or from the other arts?

No, not from the other arts. You may find a basic ingredient there, but it's not a conscious one for sure. I think my development would be totally due to my own indulgence in photography, my experimentation, and learning by default and the agony of failure. But in the long run, it's all added up.

You told me earlier that poetry particularly has been a lifelong passion. Do you think your interest in literature and music too have a bearing on the way you work as a photographer?

For sure. I think the subjective comes into it very, very strongly in that respect, especially with music, which is a nebulous stimulant and inspiration. Poetry is the same thing… Going to work sometimes I find myself mouthing Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot or whatever. I don't know whether the drivers of the adjacent cars think I'm swearing at them or what! But it just happens that way.

What about music, what are your tastes now in music?

I'm still addicted to the classics. I nominate Beethoven as number one. See, life's too short, I haven't got time, time to listen to Tchaikovsky and Beethoven and some of the others and at the same time try to assimilate what's going on at the present moment.

Are you interested in current affairs?

Oh yes, politics and whatever goes with it. We watch the news every night. As far as I'm concerned that's the bright spot of the night. There's great peace in getting home from work — a hard day achieving what I have to achieve in the studio — and sitting by a fire with a meal watching somebody else do a bit of work.

What about bed-time reading, what are the kinds of books that you'd pick up to read if you had the time?

I used to read in bed regularly but if I start doing it now I drop off not long after I get started! I don't have much time for reading, which is a pity. I intend to try and rectify that. I just got T.S. Eliot out the other day to give him a go again.

I grow old… I grow old

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

… Do I dare to eat a peach?

I have heard the mermaids singing each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

(The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock)

Does he seem to be the poet of despair when you read those things?

I hadn't thought of that. There's a cynical quality about T.S. Eliot that's very penetrating. I think he's tremendously observant of life and he's able to put it down in such brief, succinct terms. I think it's marvellous. I love Shakespeare, especially when a situation requires me to sound forth with great opposition.

Do you know Shakespeare's work by heart?

Yes, that which I learnt at school. We had marvellous teachers of Shakespeare. I think if you knew Shakespeare back to front that's all you need, that's all you'd want, that's got everything philosophically.

What is your favourite picture?

Maybe it's one I haven't done yet. The meat queue is probably one that I revere more than most. There's the recent ones [still lifes] like the pumpkin and the butterfly, and the dead bird on the newspaper with a candle. I feel the still lifes I'm doing now will possibly overshadow a lot that's been done before. There are many reasons for this, maybe because I'm 'cabin'd, cribb'd confined, pent up to forty thousand doubts and fears' insofar as the studio operations are concerned. We'll have to see about that but I dearly recall landscape and I think, before long, I will be back into the landscape field of photography. I'm looking forward to that.

What is it about doing a still life that gives you so much pleasure?

You have the opportunity to relate to so many things that are at odds with each other, like the bird and the candle. I have something else in mind which I haven't done yet — this marvellous wisteria vine, the roots of which climb up in an integrated system of lines and curves; I'm looking for a beautiful butterfly to put on the vine and then I'll photograph it — maybe by night with artificial light. Still life has a wonderful range of possibilities as far as form and content are concerned. With a still life you can arrange or rearrange or do what you like. It becomes a very, very personal exercise that you have total control over.

What makes you want to place a butterfly on the vine?

It's an outdoor thing and I've seen them flying around the wisteria. It has an unusual cognizance with those marvellous curling branches — in contrast, and also in sympathy, depending on how you approach it. It would have a dramatic quality too, especially if it were done at night with artificial light. Drama is something that I’ve always been rather akin to — only insofar as lighting is concerned, not necessarily subject matter.

What is it about The meat queue that pleases you?

I was doing a series of pictures for the Department of Information at the time. We were doing a story on queues after the war. They were all over the place — queues for buses, vegetables, fruit. I just happened to come across this butcher shop in Pitt Street, I think it was. Here they were all lined up, and I went around it, took a number of pictures, ultimately ending up with this sort of architectural approach with four or five females all dressed in black with black hats, not looking too happy about the world. Suddenly one of them breaks the queue when I'm focused up all ready to go, pure luck. She breaks the queue and the dame next to her gives her a pretty demoniac look wondering why, and we took a picture. That was it, it broke up. There's an awful lot of luck in photography. Sheer luck! It sort of makes the situation. That's photography, you couldn't do it any other way.

Do you like photographing people?

With reserve. I suppose I'm a still-life man basically, into architecture and other things. Strangely enough, though, most of my best pictures are involved with people.

Are there boundaries between your commercial work and your personal work or do you feel that you can move quite freely between them?

I'm an addict for versatility. I got this from my old boss Cecil Bostock. Well, you know, in those days you couldn't just specialize in architecture or portraiture, you had to be able to do everything. It was marvellous training as far as I was concerned. Whatever subject matter you come up against you make the most of it, without any reserves.

I did want to touch on The sunbaker, one of the most famous Australian pictures. Do you have any explanations for its fame?

No, but I'm a bit worried about it. I think it's taken on too much — so much so that you feel that one of these days they'll say 'that bloody Sunbaker, there it is again!'. It was a simple affair. We were camping down the south coast and one of my friends leapt out of the surf and slammed down onto the beach to have a sunbake — marvellous. We made the image and it's been around, I suppose as a sort of an icon of the Australian way of life.

Actually I recently heard it said that you couldn't take that photograph in good conscience now because of all the fear about the sun.

I thought of that. It might come up as a new image altogether, sooner or later.

You have photographed Sydney a lot over fifty years. How do you feel about the way Sydney is going?

I think it's a pretty poor show — overdevelopment in many respects. This is all conducive to pollution and all the by-products that civilization creates which in turn destroy civilization. I dread to think what the place is going to be like in another twenty or thirty years.

If you were set a project to photograph Sydney would you look for the old parts of Sydney or do you still have a love affair with the modern?

There are some marvellous buildings in Sydney, for sure, some wonderful concepts. But it's the people that are the worry. There are just too many of them, and too much space is devoted to bricks and mortar and not enough space to natural organic situations. Le Corbusier had a marvellous scheme many years ago in Paris, where he designed — they never got off the ground — high-rise buildings with marvellous separations and parks and trees throughout. The capitalist system won't permit that, every square inch is valuable in the money sense. Corb's idea was purely idealistic, which would never, never come to pass now.

Have you ever estimated how many photographs you have taken?

No. We’ve just moved, as you know, and the filing cabinets full of negatives are so daunting.

With regard to the photographic process, do you like printing?

I'm addicted to printing. I think it's the final stage of the sequence of making a picture. I always think that there's a series of stages in making a picture: the exposing of the sensitive film, producing the negative, printing and finishing it off. These processes have chemical solutions that are enormously important in the control of the print quality. Once you get that lined up your photography becomes a sequence of events with a certain amount of control of those events. You can forget everything else except for the concentration that you must have on the subject matter itself and the analysis of that subject matter in pictorial terms. That's the new thing: every time you take a picture, you have to assimilate what's there and turn it into photographic terms through the process that I've just mentioned. Okay, well, it takes time. I hate to say it but I always tell young photographers who come to me and ask advice in this respect that the first million are the worst.

Have you always printed your own images?

Well, I suppose for the last sixty-five to seventy years I have, that's good enough! There was a time when I remember tripping down to the chemist with a roll of film and asking for it to be processed and printed. That's a long, long time ago.

How many prints might you make to get something that you're happy with?

Three to six. It's generally three, three prints to get one and maybe more. But you're lucky if you get away with less than three. And it's expensive, though necessary.

There have been obvious changes in your printing style over the years as one would expect. Why are the photographs from the last ten years darker?

I’ve always been interested in the dramatic and I discovered that black is a very important ingredient of dramatic quality. You'll find that many of my negatives of serious photography involve a lot of clear space which is the reverse on the print — in other words, black or thereabouts. It's a situation of simplification to a large extent, insofar as photography has a marvellous tonal range. But you can interpret this and simplify it considerably by reducing that tonal range while retaining the photographic quality which infers that black is the basic ingredient. On top of that you can have some beautiful subtleties of halftones and highlights which are emphasized by the black. You'll find a lot of my work is like that.

In your recent still lifes you have used artificial lighting at night. Is that also for a sense of drama?

Soft reflected light is rather marvellous. It might be artificial but I found that the flowers, for instance, are wonderful at night. When you do them at night, even with added artificial light, you can bring them to life in their own sense rather than rely on context, which is inclined to distract and destroy the vital bit. You'll see that with most of the flowers — the magnolia, the rock lily and many others — and with the shells; different but marvellous forms. I've just gone out of my way in a photographic sense to bring them to life and emphasize their particular forms.

You've travelled widely in Australia. Where are the places that you'd like to photograph most?

Well, there's the wonderful luscious landscape of the Cairns area with undulating hills and God knows what not. The Kangaloon situation in the Southern Highlands; Western Australia has got some wonderful stuff in the coastal regions; up through the Simpson Desert and the Gibber Desert to Darwin. It's a big place, Australia, and looking back on it now I can only recall a few things. It gave me a perspective on life in the city, where I'd been born and bred, and made me aware of one of the wonderful qualities about Australia that I admire so much — a wealth of desert and no people!

How did you come to work for the Department of Information during the war?

The Information set-up was run by Ron Maslyn Williams at the time and he offered me this job. I was in the air force taking pictures for quite a long time and I thought, oh bugger this, this place is just disintegrating (the war was nearly finished). I was going to apply for a job as a war photographer and see if I could get out in amongst it again. Ronnie heard this and he said, 'we'll keep you in Australia I think and do what we can with you here', and I was sent by the Department of Information all round Australia to make pictures for publicity in respect of migration. This was the big thing in those days, to get people into Australia, so we did that. It was quite an experience.

If commercial work hadn't kept you so busy, what would you have done?

Oh, I would have been into my own thing as I am now. This ideal situation is what used to occupy my thoughts, my secret thoughts. Advertising, illustration and fashion photography, and all that goes with it, was a means of staying alive. It's rather a strange thing that my early boss Cecil Bostock used to say, 'I’ve made my reputation out of pictorial photography, and look what I have to do' — which would be trite advertising illustration and all that goes with it. In a sense it did its job as it made us versatile and able to handle anything that came to pass. Ile still got that. You'll see a certain amount of versatility, portrait work, for instance, which I find the most difficult of all, landscape, illustration, architecture, still life. That's where it originated — in the times when we just had to do it and nothing else.

What were your most difficult photographic assignments?

They're all a struggle. When I get an assignment to do, it might be a building or whatever, I'll go and look at it. I might think about it for days before I attempt to throw a camera at it.

When I look at your work from the early thirties it still looks incredibly dramatic in comparison to other work at the time. It's so different and so bold and yet it did get taken up very quickly Sydney Ure Smith seemed to have the confidence to say 'okay this is where the energy is, let's publish it and make it work'.

He was a great standby for me.

Although at that time you were in your early or mid-twenties, he obviously didn't hold your youth against you.

No, no, he didn't do that, he was interested in results. Forever and ever amen I'll be grateful to him for that, as I've said so many times. He and Julian Ashton were the two people in Sydney that just about controlled Australian art. Ure Smith with his publications Art in Australia, The Home magazine and others, and Julian Ashton with this marvellous school of art which I went to for a while. Not to much effect, but it was all good experience.

Is there anything you would like to add for posterity?

[Harold] Cazneaux is the bloke who hasn't had enough emphasis in this country. He was a great individual, in spite of the fact that he was a Pictorialist and his inspiration and tutoring came from England, where the Pictorialist movement originated. There was the Sydney Camera Circle: he was one of the founders, with Cecil Bostock, [James] Stening and about half a dozen people. You don't hear about it much now. They produced probably some of the best work in Australia at the time. Well, that's all part of the sequence of events in Australian photography and no doubt it will be recorded as such, I have a lot of respect for Cazneaux and, in spite of the overriding pictorial influence, he had individual qualities which he expressed in his work. Like the photograph on the stamps, The wheel of youth. But he was into Australian light and Australian activity in an almost documentary manner, but not quite, and a lot of his work was extremely individual for those days.

In art between the wars do you think that light was important?

Photographically, certainly.

What kind of light is it? How would you describe it?

In contrast to European light it's brilliant, it casts a great shadow, but it's wonderful to see it and use it the way you want it. You don't just accept it as light, it's got to be something else. It's got to be coming from a direction in relation to the subject matter that you're operating with. That's why we often go and look at a building before we have to photograph it, just to see what its orientation is and make a decision: 'right, we'll do this western side at such and such a time, northern side at such and such a time'. This is terribly important. But the quality of light here is marvellous, it's clear without any inhibitions, and you know, we just accept it.

Anything else you'd like to mention?

What was I going to wind up with? Llewellyn Powys's philosophy, 'l am nothing, I was nothing. Eat bread, drink wine, make love, come'. This is on an old Roman gravestone that he found somewhere and he quoted it at the end of his philosophical treatise called Impassioned Clay. It sort of negates the other things that I’ve just said.

 

Last Updated

01 Dec 2024