Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

'IT WAS A SIMPLE AFFAIR' Max Dupain Sunbaker Gael Newton The Sunbaker: I think it's taken on too much ... 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, / suppose as a sort of icon of the Australian way of life.' Facing page M ax Dupain Australia 1911-92 Sunbaker 1937 G elatin silver photograph on paper 39.1x42.5cm Purchased 1995. Queensland A rt Gallery Foundation Below Max Dupain Sunbaker II 1937 Reproduced from the monograph Max Dupain Photographs, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1948, plate 7 (dated 1940) M ax Dupain made these comments in 1991 about - his best known image Sunbaker (Queensland Art Gallery), which was taken in 1937 while the artist was holidaying on the south coast of New South Wales. Out of Dupain's vast oeuvre dating back to 1929, Sunbaker in particular has fascinated public and critics alike. It is a paradigm of Dupain's own goal of 'Simplicity at all costs'.2Although the image was rarely seen before 1975, it is probably now the single most widely recognised Australian photograph. Sunbaker made its contemporary debut as the poster image for Dupain's first retrospective exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney in 1975. The clarity and simplicity of the image proved ideal for media reproductions. Over the next two decades Sunbaker was increasingly read as an image of Australia, both past and present.3It seemed a memento of a less complex era when 'men were men, as if that mighty musclebound promoter of singlets in the 1930s, Chesty Bond, was taking a break between commercials. When recalling the conception of Sunbaker, Dupain said 'We made the image' but in reality there was no collaborator. Perhaps his comment was a tacit recognition of the way the public claimed the photograph after 1975 and then effected its apotheosis over the next decade — from archival obscurity to national icon. Dupain was a professional photographer in Sydney from 1934 until his death in 1992. He may have been a little bemused that at the end of his life those 'Holiday shots, the work I've done for pleasure' were worth $850 a print, but he pursued both professional and personal photography with high seriousness.4 Despite the phenomenal popularity of Sunbaker after 1975, it was not Dupain's particular favourite. For example, he chose to regularly exhibit Meat queue (QAG), which had its first exposure in 1946 as part of a story on postwar rationing, and in 1991 he nominated it as one of the few images to still 'have interest for me'.5 Nor was the famous Sunbaker Dupain's first choice out of the two negatives of the subject shot on that summer's day in 1937. The non-identical twin was published first in Dupain's 1948 monograph, which he described as 'a cross section of my best work since 1935'.6This preferred version was contact printed for a friend, possibly exhibited in 1940 and 1950, but was never republished and the negative was lost well before the 1970s. The two versions differ in small but significant ways and their mutual existence as part of Dupain's oeuvre reveals the complexities of photography as an art. In the 1948 monograph version (now known as Sunbaker II 1937), the figure dominates a narrow foreground in the bottom half of the image under a dullish grey sky. The camera has been raised level with the figure so that we can glimpse breaking waves through triangular gaps formed by the crook of the arms. The fingers of the sunbaker's right hand grasp those of the left hand and the left arm pillows his head. In this position the harsh overhead sun casts across the face a long shadow which extends into a jagged perimeter around the figure. It has always struck me as an uncomfortable, even anxious image. Presumably the images were taken seconds or minutes apart. I have not been able to find out which came first; it was a question I never thought to ask when Max Dupain was alive. What the change in position from one version to the other does tell us is that whilst one image may have been the sort of 'holiday shot' Dupain describes, the second happened under his direction. Indeed, having espied the potential of the scene, the photographer would certainly have had to alert the subject, his friend Harold Salvage, to remain still. Compared to its running- mate, the monograph version is perhaps a less elegant but more powerful image, given the way the figure's placement in the 142 BROUGHT TO LIGHT: Australian Art 1850-1965