Nude

WALL LABEL: Public Image, Private Lives: Family, Friends and Self in Photography, 2016

The close connection between the Australian photographers Max Dupain and Olive Cotton is revealed in two photographs from the late 1930s. Dupain’s Nude, 1938, is a beautiful study in light falling on the human form – almost like a still life – and exudes a quiet intimacy. The model is Olive Cotton, his wife-to-be, who had been working in his studio for four years.

It is shown here with Cotton’s modernist portrait of Dupain Max after surfing, 1939, an erotically charged image of her husband taken during the first year of their brief marriage. Their separation two years later was amicable; during the Second World War, when Dupain was away on war service, Cotton managed his photographic studio.

Julie Robinson, Senior Curator of Prints, Drawings & Photographs