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Max Dupain and Ansel Adams:
In search of perfection |
Modernist and Majestic
The work of Ansel Adams and Max Dupain
Gael Newton AM, August 2026
This essay is an adaption of a talk delivered at Bayside Gallery, Brighton (Melbourne) in August 2026 in conjuction with the National Gallery of Australia's touring exhibition In Search of Perfection.
Exhibition themes were: Pictorialism and The Landscape, Water, Portraits, Objects and Modernity, Dupain Architecture / Adams Landscapes
The photographs used for the talk are presented on a separate page
Commence with a queue in Queensland
In 1999, at the National Gallery of Australia, I curated Natural Causes, a touring show of black and white landscape photographs by Ansel Adams and colour environmental studies by Eliot Porter. Adams had inspired Porter to take up large format nature photography in 1933 and the two were lifelong friends. At one venue in Queensland I arrived just before the official opening to find an excited queue already at the door. They were local amateur photographers, some with their own cameras slung over a shoulder. They all knew the Adams photobooks and the technical manuals, they told me, but 'we've never seen an original print'. I was humbled. I have thought about that queue at every exhibition I have opened since. What those people had come for was not the picture.
They already knew the pictures. What they had never had was the object – the paper, the surface, the actual blacks. The real thing.
I might add that the younger visitors I spoke to that day were more interested in the Porter photographs, which they knew from the landmark 1962 Sierra Club book In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World. His gem-like colour dye transfer prints were a revelation to them. No book could capture their subtlety. Some visitors to In Search of Perfection will have seen original Adams or Dupain prints before. For others the exhibition may be a discovery, and that gives me real joy. It is what a touring exhibition of original prints is for. What we are given here is the finest of the man-made world set against the most wondrous forms of nature, and especially of wilderness.
What follows is shaped around reading the actual prints in this show: a little museology on how they came to be in the National Gallery of Australia, which is to say how collections are made; some of the differences between Dupain and Adams as artists and as personalities on opposite sides of the Pacific; and a speculation on what each might have thought of their current joint show.
Black and white, and colour
It is worth pausing to recognise how much photography has changed since these photographs were made, and what the status is today of hand printed, artisanal black and white work. Colour film became available in the 1930s but it was expensive and slow, and had to be processed at a lab. Most colour work is not hand processed or hand printed. Fast, high quality processing and printing were only widely adopted by professionals and amateurs from the 1960s on, and were standard by the 1980s. Black and white continues quite strongly in documentary photography and as an art form today, though it is seen by some as a little retro.
I majored in photography at art school in the early 1970s and did a bit of colour only in the final year. We were snooty about colour, which meant commercial photography. We were serious 'artistes'!
Both Dupain and Adams worked in colour for their commercial clients, and both excluded that work from the canon of their best work.
For Dupain, photography was at its best when it showed a thing clearly and simply. Colour was too literal; black and white, as he put it, 'suits my will to interpret and to dramatize'. For Adams, renowned as a technical expert, colour film never offered the level of control he had over black and white processing. He thought a monochrome image conveyed a deeper, more evocative psychological sense of 'colour' and atmosphere than actual colour photography did.
Adams trained as a pianist and aspired to that career first, and I have always thought his interest in a long palette of black and white tones, that insistence on the full range, from the deepest black to the cleanest white, with every gradation present, comes out of the keyboard. One often hears a soundtrack when looking at these pictures. The negative, he said, is the equivalent of the composer’s score, and the print is the performance.
Given the digital imaging revolution, one might now have to explain to a younger audience what a negative is, and how wet darkroom processing and black and white printing are done. The demanding zone system Adams developed, to control exactly which tones and details he would get in the negative is I gather now rarely used or required in digital colour imaging. Art schools are closing their wet darkrooms.
Two beginnings
The labels and wall texts in In Search of Perfection are so rich that I assume many visitors will already have digested a good deal of them, although I find it is much better to leave the labels until the second visit. Still, the two careers are worth recapping.
Like so many photographers’ origin stories, Adams and Dupain took up photography in their teens and found in it a compensatory means of expression and identity. The moral I would suggest is to give your grandchild a camera, not an iPhone.
Adams was born in San Francisco in 1902, Dupain in Sydney in 1911. Both were only children from middle class professional backgrounds and both were academically dismal. Adams was hyperactive and had to be home schooled. Dupain failed the leaving certificate at Sydney Grammar and while very fit had no interest in becoming a trainer in his father’s pioneering modern Physical Culture gym in Sydney. I have always been a little suspicious that he failed on purpose to avoid that fate.
Both began as amateurs in the soft focus, wistful art photography of Pictorialism in the 1920s and both had left it behind by the time they were established professionals in the early 1930s. There are examples of that earlier style in this exhibition. In San Francisco between 1932 and 1935 Adams led a group, Group f/64, of photographers promoting use of the f/64 stop on their cameras for maximum detail and depth of field. This was excellent for everything except fast action.
Both were quite successful at every stage of their careers, although solid print sales and art world recognition came mostly after the 1970s. Both used sharp focus, strong shapes, clean lines and a sense of underlying structure. Both promoted photography as an art form in its own right, one that did not need to ape painting or printmaking. Both were informed by spiritual and literary movements: American transcendentalism for Adams, and Vitalism and D. H. Lawrence, among others, for Dupain. Their respective published biographies deal with all aspects of their intellectual development. At the time of this talk, Helen Ennis’s book on Dupain had just won the National Biography Award.
Each stuck close to home in his preferred work. Adams travelled a great deal around America on campaigns but rarely went overseas; he achieved an international fame through the extraordinary quality of the reproductions in his books and his how-to-do-it manuals. Dupain felt no need to travel at all. He was suspicious of seeking the exotic; 'everything was here'. His only time overseas was for Seidler’s Paris embassy in 1978 and Ken Woolley’s Australian embassy in Bangkok, Thailand, in 1981.
Dupain had the more varied professional career: fashion, many portraits, landscape, social documentary of Australian life and beach culture, and a great many nudes and figure studies. He took up modernist and surrealist staged and manipulated photography in 1933 and made his reputation on ultra-chic advertising up to his war service in 1943–44, before turning in the 1950s to a concentration on architecture and industry. Some readers may have seen the Man Ray and Max Dupain surrealist show at Heide in 2025. Dupain went further into modernist geometry and abstraction than Adams ever did. After the war he more or less rejected his early, more arty work as studio fakery.
This exhibition compares Dupain’s built environment with Adams’s natural landscapes. Dupain called architecture his 'long suit', his enduring search for ideal, beautifully created form, above all in the work of the European-trained modernist architect Harry Seidler, for whom he was in effect court photographer from the 1950s to the 1980s. Of his approach to subject matter he said:
My main concern has been to seek out the inanimate and bring it to life.
You can see how perspective and light are used to animate a building.
Adams did a great deal of work as a professional photographer but was not a high street, walk-in, jack of all trades portraitist. Much of his career was run from his studio at home in Carmel, or from Yosemite Valley, where his wife’s family had a souvenir agency. He concentrated on wilderness landscape rather than pastoral or rural scenes or conventionally picturesque locations, and his photography was allied to his active campaigning for wilderness preservation.
The hero shot
Let us not be misled by either man’s claims to pure photography and simplicity. Adams darkened his skies with red filters so that peaks and clouds blazed against near-black. Dupain also used filters, and modelled silos, stairwells and bodies with strong raking light and deep shadow. In both, the camera renders the subject as something otherworldly, majestic and enduring.
Both worked from a mastery of large format. Unlike a press photographer, who must respond to what is happening in milliseconds, a large format photographer can visualise in advance how the camera, the film and the development will render the scene. Adams was the technical innovator, working out through light meter, lens, filter and chemistry exactly how to make a scene come out a certain way. Dupain took a simpler road but knew precisely when and in what light a building would look its best; he was governed by the first weather report at dawn. The architectural photographer John Gollings, who spoke at Bayside last month, calls his most distilled images the 'hero' shots.
The Museum Set
It is easy to take for granted that these Adams prints are on the wall in Brighton, but their back story is pretty wild. Going round the exhibition on that second visit, reading the labels, you will notice that the credit line on most of the Adams prints refers to the Museum Set.
In 1975 Adams announced that he would make no new work for sale, release no new portfolios and fill no further orders from his past work after December 1976. Instead he would select around a hundred of his best images from an already culled 'review pool' of some 2,500 black and white negatives dating from 1923 to 1968. He had tens of thousands of other negatives, and the colour work from his commercial career, but these were excluded. It was a radical decision, taken to safeguard his legacy, and his dealers would have been aghast.
Orders poured in and kept Adams printing until 1977. He set to work on the new project, 'the Museum Set' as he came to call it. It is his 1978 autobiography in images. By 1980 it was being released in groups of 25, 45 and 70 prints, all personally printed by Adams. Each group included his ten most famous images. No two sets are identical. It was a huge task. The sets were to be sold only to museums and educational institutions, or to private and corporate buyers who agreed to give their set to a public collection in due course.
In 1980 the National Gallery of Australia was actively building its international photography collection ahead of the opening in Canberra in October 1982. Three Adams portfolios had already been acquired in 1977, and some prints from these are in this exhibition. Even so, the Gallery applied to Adams to buy the full 70-print Museum Set. He approved the purchase. It was most likely the first sale, and he probably had to look up Canberra on a map.
The Museum Set cost $A137,000, a sum that required ministerial approval. It was a stonkering amount, over $690,000 in today’s money, and few museums anywhere had that kind of money for photography. So it was a massive statement of support for photography as an art form in this country, at a time when the National Gallery of Victoria from 1967, the National Gallery of Australia from 1972 and the Art Gallery of New South Wales from 1975 were the first art museums here to actively establish photographic art as part of the permanent collection.
Approval was had and Ansel got to work. The prints were made and delivered by December 1981 and in 1983 the Gallery mounted what is so far as anyone knows the first Museum Set exhibition anywhere. The five Surf Sequence images on the wall here came as a bonus for purchasing the complete set. Only the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the J. Paul Getty Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art hold complete sets, all of them donated. The Australian set remains the only one outside North America.
Reading the prints
The Museum Set prints are all large, very crisp, and on bright white photographic paper. Developments in cameras, enlargers, films, papers and photochemistry by the 1960s made prints of that brilliance possible, able to capture every scrap of information in the negative.
One of the real pleasures of photographic art is that print styles change over time, sometimes for technical reasons and sometimes to suit the taste of the day. Many of the Adams images would have looked quite different when they were first printed. Prints made close to the date of the negative by the photographer are called vintage prints, and collectors now value them more highly than a photographer’s late-life printings. Developers can change the colour of the dark tones, but no highlight in a print can ever be brighter than the colour of the paper itself, and the older papers gave no stark blacks at all.
Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California, 1923, is the earliest work in the Museum Set. It is soft focus, with quite shallow perspective. The only known vintage print shows that at this stage Adams still had a softer aesthetic and a warmer tone. The complete Museum Set is mostly landscape, with a few Native American buildings and almost no built environment at all. Which brings me to Moonrise.
Moonrise
Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico is the most famous photograph Ansel Adams ever made, and one of the most reproduced landscape photographs in the world. You can see why. It is mesmerising. It is also one of the very few images of settlement in the Museum Set and ironically for a photographer who so promoted careful previsualisation, an unexpected chance image.
The back story has become legendary and is well detailed online. In essence Adams was travelling at dusk with his son and an official on a major commission for murals of lands under the Department of the Interior. He saw the scene, stopped, tried to get all the gear out, and had to take the shot without his exposure metre, guessing the exposure from what he knew to be the light value of the moon. A few seconds later the sun came off the crosses. One negative. No second chance.
Now to the printing, because this is where the picture bears on my earlier point about vintage prints and later prints. The early prints show a grey, open sky with the moon quite modest in it, much closer to what he actually saw through the ground glass that afternoon. The negative was difficult. The lower part was thin, underexposed, and in 1948 Adams refixed and intensified it to get more out of the foreground. Over time he pushed the contrast: more dramatic, more nocturnal, more other-worldly. He made something like 1,300 prints, all just slightly different. Several commentators have noted how much darker Adams’s prints in general became as he aged, and have read it as his own sentiments becoming more sombre.
The market agrees. A 1948 print made $609,600 at Sotheby’s in 2006, a record for Adams at the time. In December 2020 the earliest print ever to come to market, one of the handful made before he refixed the negative, sold for $685,500. Mural-sized versions have since gone close to a million US dollars.
Adams said he received more letters about this photograph than about anything else he ever made. He also felt obliged to state repeatedly and with some weariness that it is not a double exposure.
The photograph is not the moment. The photograph is what he decided, over four decades, that the moment should mean. Which is why those amateur photographers in Queensland were right to queue.
I close this part with a Max Dupain moonrise at the Sydney Opera House. Adams would have wanted crisper detail.
How the Dupains were acquired
Collections are built from different sources over time, and they reflect changes of attitude.
Max Dupain was always at the top of the list for any Australian photography collection being formed from the 1970s on, and certainly for the National Gallery, which now holds over 300 Dupain works. The National Gallery of Victoria has a sizeable 94, the Art Gallery of New South Wales 449, and the State Library of New South Wales holds the major archive.
Dupain began exhibiting art photographs such as Ripples and Reeds in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and these early prints were sought for the National Gallery of Australia's collection. But even before he finished his apprenticeship and opened his own studio in 1934 he had taken up modernist photography: bold geometric images with clean lines, strong light, abstract elements and unusual perspective.
It is hard to imagine now how radical Dupain’s bold industrial images of the early 1930s were, even by comparison with most paintings and prints of the day, although the extensive art representation of the Sydney Harbour Bridge did celebrate modern engineering. In 1933–35 he shocked the members of the local photographic society, which he had joined as a schoolboy in 1928, with his bold geometric Pyrmont silos. He chose the silos because they were the most modern concrete structures in Sydney. Photography, for Dupain, was part of the zeitgeist of the modern machine age. He had posted his flag.
Where possible, curators and collectors now search for vintage prints. Pyrmont Silos, 1935, whose bold upward angle he returned to many times in his later architectural work, is here in a vintage print purchased in 1976, with the cooler-toned later print on the right. Those intersecting curves and diagonals, symbolically male and female, turn up again and again across his career.
1980: what Max wanted
I first met Max Dupain in 1975. In 1980 I prepared the first museum retrospective and monograph on his work, for the Art Gallery of New South Wales. I was pretty inexperienced. He was already an institution. And I made a decision that he did not much like.
I concentrated on the pre-war career, the surrealism, the fashion and advertising, the overt modern geometry of the Pyrmont silos, work that by 1980 had been almost entirely forgotten. I included mostly the abstract, 'arty' architecture and industry images. What I left out was the bread and butter of his post-war practice. And yet the post-war architectural photography was precisely what Max considered his most important work.
He made a few mild suggestions about including more late architecture, but art museum curators can be pretty intimidating, and he was more gracious about it than he needed to be. He was genuinely pleased to see the early work brought back into the light, and pleased, I think, to be told that the young man of 1934 was worth another look, even though he had firmly repudiated that era as fake photography. But he never quite conceded the point about the importance of the buildings. He was all the same pretty pleased with the show and the monograph.
We remained friends throughout the process and afterwards. He would send people to me to explain hidden psychological readings of his images. And I will say now that he was right and I was incomplete. Which brings me to a cupboard in North Sydney.
The cupboards at North Sydney
In about 2000 I had the chance to go through the cupboards at Harry Seidler and Associates’ gorgeous office at North Sydney, looking over Luna Park. What was in those cupboards was the working archive of a forty-year collaboration. I was left alone to look at the prints, which were mostly large and intended for various displays. There were piles of them, and at the time I found them interesting and worth adding to the collection but not, in truth, super exciting.
In 2001 Seidler made a major gift of these Dupain prints to the National Gallery of Australia, and they have made this show possible. You will see that the older prints from the Seidler gift have a softer character than the brighter, higher contrast prints of Australia Square in 1968. It is an enormous boon to have them. It is also, for me, the part of Max’s work that I did not put on the wall in 1980, finally hanging on a wall.
The later portraits of Max are rather sombre, and he is subdued in the film in the exhibition. Adams by contrast is jolly in every portrait ever taken of him.
I love the picture of Max and Harry taken by Eric Sierins in March 1991, a year before Max died in July 1992.
That photograph has a back story of its own. Eric told me that Historic Houses had Dupain photograph the Rose Seidler house after renovations, and that Seidler rejected most of the results, particularly the exteriors, with the shadows of trees falling across the house. The March 1991 session was instigated by Seidler as a consequence, and it fell in Dupain’s last year of active work. As Eric put it to me, there ended up being some synergy between Max Dupain’s first photograph for Harry Seidler and this last one: Marcell Seidler photographed the Julian Rose Seidler house and then suggested Dupain from then on, and Dupain began his photography for Seidler with the fabulous Rose House photograph. Dupain died after an illness on 27 July 1992.
Dupain and Adams, side by side
One of my favourite comparisons in this show is between Adams’s 1960 Half Dome, Yosemite, and Dupain’s dramatic 1968 view of the Calder sculpture outside Australia Square, Harry Seidler’s best known Sydney tower. Both are technically and artistically superb accounts of detail, tone and that sense of three-dimensional space which is the particular strength of camera vision.
And neither man would have had the slightest interest in the other’s subject. Adams had little interest in cities or in modern architecture, and would quite likely have found many of Seidler’s buildings in conflict with their setting. He would probably have offered Dupain some advice about getting more detail into the shadows and a longer tonal range, and he would not have approved of a slewed, exaggerated perspective. Dupain for his part wanted animation in a form, even sensuality. He would have thought the all-over detail of an Adams print distracted from the first simple impact.
And note this. A visitor standing at either site today would be most unlikely ever to see these compositions.
They are not records. They are both, entirely, creations.
Two temperaments
Adams was nine years older, so he knew more of a pre-1914 world, where Dupain was caught up in the modern spirit of the 1920s and 1930s. Adams became a natural leader, engaged all his life with groups and organisations and a prodigious publisher of high quality photobooks and instruction manuals.
Dupain had Hollywood good looks, kept a scull on Sydney Harbour, was slim and fit all his life and was a charming man. But after the war as his work turned to often austere buildings, he too grew steadily more austere and less social, though he exhibited regularly and took on a role as a photography critic in later life, and his reviews, while opinionated, were well written and well followed. He sought simplicity and clarity in his work but he was a complex character who seemed unable to stop and enjoy the attention, love, interest and honours awarded to him in his last two decades.
Perhaps the neatest way to put the difference is this. Adams was modern; Dupain was Modernist in the sense of the art movement of the early to mid twentieth century. Adams was an advocate of very sharp, deep perspective and ever more precise technical control, and would perhaps have had no interest in the overtly arty compositions Dupain favoured in the work he chose to exhibit.
What would they have made of In Search of Perfection?
Dupain knew about Adams. Adams, so far as I can establish, had no idea that Australian photographers existed. Of Adams’s demanding technical regime, Dupain said: I’ve always believed a great photographer should concentrate more on depth of feeling and less on depth of field. An associate reported that Dupain found Adams’s work a little cold, and others have said the zone system kills spontaneity. But Dupain possibly never saw an original Adams print either.
Max Dupain, whom I knew very well and remained friends with throughout his later life, and Ansel Adams, whom I have studied long enough to feel I know, would I think both be intrigued and pleased by this show. I think they would recognise that they shared a belief in what photography does best: rendering the three-dimensional world, but shaped by an individual vision.
Choose your own adventure
So back to where I began. Every exhibition is unique. The prints are in conversation in a way that is specific to that show and that venue, no matter how meticulously the layouts are preplanned. When In Search of Perfection is shown elsewhere, different prints will be seen together, and the sight lines will suggest different relationships.
Photographs of this kind are very relatable, and we each bring our own experience to them. I still like to choose which work I would take home. Perhaps on your next visit choose your own favourite and write down why it appeals to you. It can be surprising what personal memories and thoughts are triggered by art. And when you look, reflect a little on what the picture means.
Dupain’s emotion does come through in comparing these images. So often he brings you into a scene, even when the scene is a building. Surf Edge is one of my favourites: so tantalising, slightly sexy, and all about the moment when we feel a connection with an image. Adams takes you to outer space and then back into yourself.
And stand in front of the Moonrise for longer than you think you need to. I have been looking at Dupain in particular, and at Adams, since the 1970s.
I never tire of seeing the prints, and I see something new each time.
In Search of Perfection was conceived by my former National Gallery of Australia colleague Anne O’Hehir, Curator of Photography, who placed Max Dupain’s classically elegant black and white architectural photographs beside Adams’s majestic alpine and desert landscapes of the American West.
My thanks and congratulations to her, and to the Bowness Family Foundation here in Melbourne for its support of the touring of National Gallery of Australia photographic exhibitions.
Congratulations too to Helen Ennis on the recently announced award for her Dupain biography. A Harry Seidler exhibition is currently showing at the Chau Chak Wing Museum, University of Sydney.
The Photographs: used to accompany the talk by Gael Newton AM
More on Max Dupain
Essays by Gael Newton AM
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