Brought to Light Australian Art 1850-1965

subject (who has no messy towel to disturb the austerity of the image) is seen from somewhere slightly below the plane of the figure. This worm's-eye vision is not a natural choice but endemic to the conceptual vantage points favoured in modernist photography in the 1920s and 1930s. New Photography revelled in rendering the everyday world through the use of strange, low, oblique, and close-up views. The figure in Sunbaker also embodies the counterpoint of energy and stasis evident in classical Greek sculpture. Dupain used his fathers miniature reproductions of the famous Discobolus and Venus de Milo in a number of works over his early and late career. He provided illustrations for his fathers books on physical education and health (he once posed as The dying Gaul ) and made frequent references to sculptural qualities in his works. Of course, classical busts and figures were a recurrent motif in surrealist art and Dupairis work in the 1930s was stimulated to passionate expression by this modern movement.15 Just as the presentation of the figure in Sunbaker is transformed by the choice of a dramatic camera angle, the setting is also recast as an empty and timeless space — a surreal space. This intense privacy in open space is part of the experience of sunbaking, combining elements of exhibitionism and introspection. Those familiar with beach life find the image evocative. We hear the thud of body on hard sand and know the feel of sun, salt and sweat. But there is no story in Sunbaker as such (though some viewers imagined the swimmer had collapsed after perils at sea), not even the cleverness of much 'decisive moment' photography. Expatriate Australian critic Geoffrey Batchen has teased out the paradox of the image in which: [the] symmetry also works to draw the viewer's eye into the black void at the centre of the picture, adding a menacing sexuality to its sense of dynamic implosion. In short the Sunbaker is one of those images that fascinates because of its ability simultaneously to attract and repel the gaze.16 At the time of making his picture Dupain was 26, athletic and handsome, just like the Sunbaker. After only three years in the business he was the most publicly profiled professional photographer in Sydney, not in the old model of exclusive, upper-class society and viceregal portraiture, but in the new world of commercial and editorial photography. Dupain actively exhibited his personal work in local art photography and professional salons from 1932, and his work also appeared in Art in Australia and The Home magazine under the patronage of art publisher Sydney lire Smith. Ever innovative in art publishing, it was also lire Smith who chose to make a monograph on Dupain in 1948 as one of the photography-based publications that announced the postwar recovery. It was an expensive production limited to one thousand copies. For the monograph Dupain (probably in collaboration with lire Smith) chose his 'best work', but the surrealist works and fashion assignments were gone. This was a sober, postwar world and Dupain had come under the influence of the philosophy of filmmaker John Grierson whose term 'actuality' Dupain used to describe his own documentary work. Dupairis vision sought a reductive but dynamic clarity as if this quality was a bastion against the confusions of other aspects of the world competing for attention. Dupairis goals were for simplicity but his aesthetic was complex in its understanding of how actuality related to the wider notions of documentary photography.17On a personal level, across Dupairis work, the motif of a lone male figure can be found, even in a crowd; in some cases, as with Anzac Square c.1940-45 (QAG), these figures are stalked by deathlike shadows. Like Dupain, who was agnostic and republican in spirit but not active politically, this alter ego is not one of the herd. Is Sunbaker autobiographical in the sense of expressing the artist's own sensitivity and aloneness or a counter to the images of jingoistic 'blokes' in the popular media? The text that Dupain contributed to the 1948 monograph makes considerable claims for the meaning of the images: Many people will, I hope, derive ideas from them and some no doubt will be 'amused', but that is not my intention nor ambition. Modern photography must do more than entertain, it must incite thought and, by its clear statements of actuality, cultivate a sympathetic understanding of men and women and the life they create and live. I profoundly believe it can accomplish this.18 Above Max Dupain Anzac Square c.1940-45 Gelatin silver photograph on paper 40.7x39cm Purchased 1992 Queensland Art Gallery In his commentaries Dupain tried to articulate how photographs resolve the objective and the subjective, the fortuitous and the expressive — not such a simple affair after all! Gael Newton is Senior Curator, Australian Photography, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra. Left Page from Vandyke scrapbook showing Dupain (with camera) and friends on holidays at Culburra, 1938, courtesy Jill White and Mrs Joan Vandyke, Sydney 'IT WAS A SIMPLE AFFAIR' 147