Max Dupain and Ansel Adams: In search of perfection

Modernist and Majestic

The Photographs (with added text)

The work of Ansel Adams and Max Dupain

Gael Newton AM, August 2026

The photographs that accompanied the 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.

Extra text has been sourced and added to each photograph: this text was sourced from many online resources and editted for this page.

#01: image above - Max Dupain’s 1979 image of the UTS Ku-ring-gai campus in Lindfield (Sydney), featuring a design by architect David Turner.

#02: Max Dupain Harry Seidler & Associates Australia Square Tower, October 1968 with Crossed Blades by Alexander Calder, commissioned for the George Street entrance National Gallery of Australia Collection		#03: Ansel Adams Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California 1960 National Gallery of Australia Collection

#02: Max Dupain’s study of the Australia Square Tower (October 1968) stands as one of the most defining images generated by his iconic, decades-long collaboration with modernist architect Harry Seidler. Completed in 1967, Australia Square was a landmark engineering feat, Sydney’s first true light-weight concrete skyscraper and the world’s tallest reinforced concrete building at the time. Dupain's photographic interpretation captures the sheer structural optimism of Australia's post-war architectural transformation.

Dupain positioned his large-format camera near the base of the plaza, shooting almost vertically up the curved flank of the cylinder. This perspective translates the 50-story cylindrical tower into a razor-sharp, soaring diagonal vector. Rather than providing a literal documentary record of the plaza, Dupain abstracts the architecture into an arrangement of pure form, deep shadow, and gleaming structural concrete.

Dupain worked as Harry Seidler’s preferred architectural photographer for over 40 years. Both men shared a Bauhaus-influenced commitment to functionalism, geometry, structural integrity, and clean line. Seidler famously remarked that Dupain was one of the few photographers who understood the spatial logic of his buildings, using strong Australian sunlight and deep shadows to accentuate architectural form.

 

---

 

#03: Ansel Adams’s Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California (1960) is one of his late wilderness masterworks, capturing the crisp, monumental geometry of Yosemite's most famous granite face set against a daytime sky.  Shot on December 28, 1960, from Glacier Point using a long focal length lens (a 13-inch Cooke lens on a 4x5 view camera).

Adams calculated the precise moment the nearly gibbous moon hung directly above the crest of Half Dome before the late afternoon sun slipped beneath the horizon. Adams used a strong deep red filter to radically darken the blue sky to near-black (Zone I/II), making both the luminous moon and the sunlit snow on the granite cliff faces pop with intense clarity.

The composition relies on the massive vertical shadow cutting across the lower face of Half Dome, contrasting organic rock texture with sharp geometric darks. Demonstrating peak Zone System mastery, the print retains fine detail in both the shadowed canyon below and the brilliantly lit rock faces and lunar craters.

The photograph is included as a key plate in Portfolio IV and his canonical 1981 Museum Set.

#04: The California Sierra Club 1962 book paired Thoreau's words with color photographs by Eliot Porter, which helped popularize the phrase as an environmental motto. National Gallery of Australia Collection		#05: Eliot Porter Pool in a brook. Pond Brook, near Whiteface, New Hampshire. October 1953 hand made dye transfer print National Gallery of Australia Collection

#04: The 1962 landmark Sierra Club publication "In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World", featuring color photography by Eliot Porter paired with excerpted writings by Henry David Thoreau, revolutionized fine art photography publishing and modern environmental advocacy. The title derives directly from Thoreau’s famous 1862 essay Walking, in which he declared, "In Wildness is the preservation of the World."

David Brower, executive director of the Sierra Club, conceived the project as part of the Sierra Club's famous Exhibit Format Series. Brower recognized that high-quality art books could serve as potent visual lobbying tools to build public support for wilderness protection. At a time when serious art photographers including Ansel Adams and Edward Weston largely dismissed color photography as vulgar or commercial, Eliot Porter championed the dye-transfer color printing process as a fine art medium capable of exquisite subtle nuance.

Unlike Ansel Adams's grand, dramatic black-and-white mountain vistas, Porter turned his view camera toward subtle, micro-landscapes: autumn leaves floating on clear streams, forest floor lichens, bird nests, and delicate seasonal color shifts across New England woodlands. Each full-page color plate was thoughtfully paired on the facing page with excerpts from Thoreau’s journals and essays (Walden, Walking), creating a contemplative rhythm between 19th-century transcendentalist philosophy and 20th-century visual ecology.

Porter meticulously controlled the dye-transfer process in his darkroom, achieving luminous, archival color saturation and exact shadow-to-highlight fidelity that standard commercial offset printing had never previously matched. Following the massive critical success of the 1962 hardcover edition, the Sierra Club partnered with Ballantine Books in 1967 to release a compact, affordable mass-market paperback edition (pictured). It became a publishing phenomenon, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and introducing fine art color photography into mainstream American homes.

The book proved that fine art publications could directly mobilize public opinion. Its success established the template for late-20th-century environmental campaigns, blending poetic text with high-end color visual culture.

---

 

#05:   Eliot Porter’s Pool in a brook, Pond Brook, near Whiteface, New Hampshire (October 1953) is the celebrated cover image for the Sierra Club’s landmark 1962 publication “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” It stands as one of the most recognized and influential color photographs in 20th-century American photography.

Porter positioned his large-format view camera looking directly down into the water, eliminating the horizon line, sky, and surrounding bank. The water’s surface becomes the entire canvas, echoing the all-over spatial compositions of Abstract Expressionist painting.

The image relies on a balance of reflection and depth. The warm orange and amber tones mirrored at the top of the frame capture the autumn foliage above, merging smoothly into the cool, deep blue sky reflections across the center and dark shadow zones at the bottom. Fallen birch and maple leaves float on the surface, acting as bright yellow accents that disrupt the fluid color bands and anchor the viewer’s eye across the frame.

Color film transparencies of the 1950s struggled to capture the delicate range of low-light forest colors. Porter used the dye-transfer process, a complex color separation technique where yellow, magenta, and cyan dyes were hand-applied from separation matrices onto fiber paper, to achieve rich saturation and control contrast. Dye-transfer prints allowed Porter to ensure these subtle variations in water reflection and leaf hue would remain stable and vibrant over decades.

As the cover plate for the Sierra Club’s 1962 book (and subsequent 1967 Ballantine mass-market paperback), this single image introduced fine art color photography into millions of households.

The photograph demonstrated that nature photography did not require dramatic mountain peaks to convey power. By elevating an overlooked micro-landscape, a quiet pool of autumn leaves, Porter helped broaden the aesthetic definition of wilderness conservation.

#06: Photo by Olive Cotton (1911-2003) Max Dupain at Longueville 1939 printed 1980s National Gallery of Australia Collection		#07: Ansel Adams self portrait 1948. The camera is probably a Zeiss Ikon Universal Juwel. He holds a Weston light meter.

#06:  Olive Cotton’s portrait Max Dupain at Longueville (1939) is one of the most intimate and celebrated portraits in mid-century Australian photographic history. Captured during a key year in both photographers' personal and professional lives, the image balances spontaneous, relaxed warmth with modern formal control.

Olive Cotton and Max Dupain were childhood friends whose families spent holidays together at Newport Beach. Their shared passion for photography blossomed in their youth, leading to a professional partnership in Dupain’s Sydney studio during the 1930s.

The year 1939 was significant, it marked both their marriage and the height of their creative collaboration at the Bond Street studio in Sydney. Longueville, a leafy suburb along the Lane Cove River in Sydney’s lower North Shore, was home to the Dupain family house. The relaxed domestic environment provided a private backdrop away from commercial studio assignments.

Unlike formal studio portraits, Cotton captures Dupain in a candid, crouching pose on a doorstep, leaning forward with an open, relaxed smile. His sleeves are rolled up, and his camera hangs casually around his neck. Dupain holds his twin-lens reflex camera (a Rolleiflex), emphasizing his identity as a practitioner while keeping the atmosphere unpretentious and conversational.

True to Cotton’s subtle modernist eye, the composition frames Dupain against structured background elements: the dark timber doorframe and the repeating, geometric brickwork of the house.

This photograph provides an essential counterpoint to Jill White’s well-known later portrait of Dupain holding his large-format Linhof view camera. Where White's portrait emphasizes the authoritative, legendary master of Australian architectural photography, Cotton's 1939 image captures a youthful, energetic contemporary at the dawn of his career.

Beyond documenting Dupain, the portrait stands as evidence of Cotton’s distinct artistic voice, characterized by gentle, natural light, emotional resonance, and sophisticated structural composition, which flourished alongside Dupain’s bolder, machine-age style.

 

---

 

#07:  Ansel Adams’s Self-Portrait (c. 1948)—often associated with his work in Yosemite National Park or during his Guggenheim Fellowship trips—is one of the definitive images of Adams as a mid-century field practitioner, presenting him fully equipped in his working element.

Mounted on his wooden tripod is his prized 4×5 Zeiss Ikon Universal Juwel folding glass-plate/sheet-film camera. Known for its exceptional German engineering, double-extension bellows, and extensive rise/fall/shift movements, the Juwel was one of Adams's favorite field cameras during the 1930s and 1940s.

Prominently hanging around his neck (or held in hand) is a Weston Master exposure meter. This was an indispensable tool for Adams, serving as the essential instrument he used to calculate exact luminance values across the scenes he photographed to formulate his Zone System.

Wearing his signature wide-brimmed Stetson hat, open-collar shirt, and heavy jacket, Adams gazes past the lens rather than staring directly at it. This frames him not as a passive subject, but as an active observer surveying the surrounding landscape. The long cable shutter release wire extends downward from the lens shutter into his hand, making no attempt to disguise the mechanics of the self-portrait. The background consists of dense pine foliage and forest undergrowth, embedding Adams directly within the wilderness ecosystems he spent six decades photographing and fighting to conserve.

This image serves as a visual document of Adams at the peak of his technical mastery during the late 1940s—the same era he produced works like Ferns and Leaves, Glacier Bay and worked on his fundamental instructional manuals (The Camera, The Negative, and The Print).

Gelatin silver prints and archival negatives of Adams’s self-portraits from this period are preserved in the official Ansel Adams Archive at the Center for Creative Photography (CCP) at the University of Arizona, as well as the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.

#08: Anne W Brigman 1869–1950 Sanctuary – The Grand Canyon Arizona, 1921 vintage gelatin silver photograph NGA Purchased 2014 National Gallery of Australia Collection

#08: Anne Brigman’s Sanctuary, The Grand Canyon, Arizona (1921) is a quintessential example of American Pictorialism, capturing the radical fusion of nature, myth, and the human form that made Brigman a key figure in early 20th-century avant-garde photography. Anne W. Brigman (1869–1950) was a pioneering female photographer based in Northern California and the only major West Coast member inducted into Alfred Stieglitz’s elite Photo-Secession collective.

Brigman became famous for leading daring outdoor expeditions into the High Sierra and Western wilderness areas, often carrying heavy camera gear to remote, rugged terrain. In 1921, Brigman spent significant time exploring and working at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. This period yielded some of her most dramatic compositions, integrating the massive geological fissures of the canyon with the human figure.

In the lower third of the composition, a solitary, cloaked or draped figure stands on a rocky ledge jutting out over a sheer abyss. The figure is dwarfed by the towering, hazy geological formations of the Grand Canyon rising in the background. The title Sanctuary speaks directly to the spiritual philosophy underlying Brigman's work. To Brigman, the raw wilderness was a sacred space of emotional freedom, healing, and personal liberation away from the constraints of urban society.

Rather than documenting the Grand Canyon with topographical clarity, Brigman used soft-focus lenses and dramatic atmospheric haze. The tiered rock formations take on the quality of a ancient cathedral or dreamscape.

True to the Pictorialist ethos, Brigman treated the photographic negative merely as a starting point for artistic expression. She routinely worked directly on her glass plate negatives using graphite, retouching tools, and etching knives to soften contours, enhance shadows, or add painterly, atmospheric fog. Printed on textured fine-art paper, the print displays delicate tonal gradation, ranging from velvety darks in the foreground rock ledge to luminous, soft grays across the distant canyon walls.

While younger photographers like Ansel Adams and Edward Weston were beginning to reject Pictorialism in favor of "straight" photography by the 1920s, Brigman’s symbolic, feminist-aligned integration of the figure within the Western landscape laid important groundwork for later performance art and feminist photography.

See link at bottom of this page for more on Anne Brigman

#09: Max Dupain, Ripples and reeds c1928. vintage gelatin silver photograph Purchased 1982, an early print while still at Sydney Grammar signed Max S Dupain - Maxwell Spencer Dupain Max’s father admired Oswald Spencer National Gallery of Australia Collection		#10: Ansel Adams, Meadow near Bishop Pass southern Sierra Nevada 1930 photogravure Purchased 1987. This work was acquired to give context to The Museum Set. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#09:  Max Dupain’s Ripples and Reeds (c. 1928) is a rare and essential early work capturing the photographer at just 17 years old. It provides a fascinating window into his brief, initial engagement with Pictorialism, the dominant artistic movement in Australia during the 1910s and 1920s, right before he radically abandoned it for hard-edged modernism.

Made while Dupain was still a teenager active in the New South Wales Camera Club, the image uses soft focus, low contrast, and warm, diffused light to emulate an etching or impressionistic drawing. The print emphasizes atmospheric mood and shimmering water reflections over sharp structural detail. Light catches the gentle ripples of the river surface while the reeds form a hazy, romantic silhouetted screen across the foreground.

Dupain printed the image on heavy, textured paper stock with hand-titled and signed margins, a classic Pictorialist presentation intended to elevate the photograph to the status of traditional fine art prints.

Ripples and Reeds serves as the ultimate counterpoint to Dupain's mature work. Just a few years after making this photograph, Dupain discovered European New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) and American modernist photography. By the early 1930s, he famously renounced Pictorialism as "sentimental romanticism," pivoting entirely to sharp focus, strong light, bold shadows, and machine-age geometry.

Surviving vintage prints from the late 1920s are exceptionally rare. Important holdings of his early pictorialist studies are preserved in public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra and the State Library of New South Wales.

 

---

 

#10:  Ansel Adams’s Meadow near Bishop Pass, Southern Sierra Nevada (1930), often titled or cataloged as Meadow, Inconsolable Range or High Sierra Meadow, is an exquisite early intimate landscape created during a crucial moment in his formal evolution.

In 1930, Adams was serving as the official photographer for the Sierra Club's annual "High Trip" expedition through the backcountry of the High Sierra. Bishop Pass sits at an elevation of over 11,900 feet (3,600 meters) in the eastern Sierra, surrounded by the dramatic, jagged peaks of the Inconsolable Range. The year 1930 was personally transformative for Adams: during a trip to Taos, New Mexico that same summer, he met Paul Strand. Strand’s razor-sharp negatives inspired Adams to completely abandon soft-focus Pictorialism and commit to pure, unmanipulated "straight" photography.

Rather than looking upward to photograph the sweeping, monolithic granite ridges of Bishop Pass, Adams turned his camera directly downward toward the fragile high-alpine flora. The photograph captures delicate alpine wildflowers (such as Shooting Stars or Paintbrush) and tufted meadow grasses caught in intense rim lighting.

True to his emerging modernist sensibility, the image bypasses traditional spatial depth. By filling the entire picture plane with close-up plant structures, Adams creates a dense, tactile micro-tapestry of light, shadow, and organic form. It stands as an early precursor to his famous 1940s and 1950s detail studies (such as Ferns and Leaves, Glacier Bay), proving that his vision was as attuned to small-scale botanical elegance as it was to massive alpine vistas.

Vintage prints from this 1930 period were often executed on warm-toned silver papers or Kodak Vitava paper, frequently mounted on delicate cream-colored boards, just as seen in your provided image, reflecting the transition between his 1920s Parmelian portfolio aesthetic and his mature 1930s Group f/64 work.

 

 

#11: Max Dupain, City Lights 1939purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia Collection

#11:  Max Dupain’s City Lights (1939) is a masterwork of Australian late-1930s modernism, capturing the Sydney Harbour Bridge at night from a plunging, dramatic viewpoint high above the deck. Created seven years after the bridge opened in 1932, the image reflects Dupain’s departure from pictorial sentimentality in favor of sharp-focused machine-age aesthetics and graphic geometry.

Dupain positioned his camera high on one of the bridge's massive granite pylons or upper steel girders, looking steeply down along the roadway and iron superstructure. This steep, diagonal vector flattens the vast engineering feat into a dynamic graphic composition.

By using a extended exposure on a tripod, Dupain transformed moving vehicular traffic into luminous white ribbons of light slicing across the bridge deck. The streetlamps cast glowing halos against the dark steel framework, contrasting bright pinpricks of electric light against deep, velvety black shadows and the soft, ambient glow of the city sky across the harbor.

City Lights celebrates urban vitality, technological progress, and industrial steel structure. Rather than treating Sydney as a quiet harbour town, Dupain framed it as a bustling modern metropolis illuminated by electricity. The visual strategy parallels European and American modernist night studies of the period, such as Berenice Abbott's New York views or Brassaï's Paris de Nuit, while remaining uniquely tied to Sydney's most iconic landmark.

 

 

#12: The Ansel Adams ‘Museum Set’: A boxed portfolio consisting of 75 gelatin silver photographs, Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust, San Francisco, CA, 1981

#12:  The Ansel Adams "Museum Set" Edition (1981) represents the absolute capstone of Adams’s career as a master darkroom printer and institutional advocate for fine art photography. Conceived in the late 1970s as Adams approached 80, the Museum Set was created to satisfy two primary goals: to establish a definitive, ultimate retrospective of his life’s work curated by the artist himself, and to ensure major public institutions and serious collectors could acquire a comprehensive, lifetime-printed body of his masterworks.

Out of thousands of negatives produced over six decades, Adams selected a core group of 75 canonical images, spanning early 1920s Pictorialist studies like Lodgepole Pines, 1930s Group f/64 abstractions like Boards and Thistles, landmark architectural studies like Saint Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, and grand wilderness views like Moonrise, Hernandez and The Tetons and the Snake River.

In 1979, overwhelmed by the commercial demand for individual prints, Adams officially stopped taking commercial orders. The Museum Set became his singular focus, allowing him to concentrate his remaining years in his Carmel darkroom on executing these comprehensive portfolios with exact technical perfection.

While designed as a complete 75-print set housed in custom archival wooden or fabric-bound presentation cases, subscribers (mostly museums, universities, and private donors) were occasionally permitted to purchase smaller curated subsets (such as 25 or 40 prints), though the full edition represents the complete 75-photograph vision.

While darkroom assistants like Alan Ross helped with initial chemical processing and washing under Adams’s strict supervision, Adams personally evaluated, dodged, burned, and approved every final print included in the set.

The Museum Set fundamentally shaped how 20th-century art museums collect and display fine art photography. By packaging his career into a self-contained, archival "boxed museum," Adams ensured that future generations could experience his work not through isolated impressions, but as an interconnected artistic lifetime.

 

Ansel Adams established the Museum Set structure so that every collection, whether acquired in a size of 25, 45, or 75 photographs, was anchored by a required "core" set of 10 iconic images.   While the full list of remaining selectable prints varied slightly according to institutional preferences, the standard core 10 consists of his most recognized and definitive masterpieces:

1. Monolith, The Face of Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California (1927)
2.  Bridalveil Fall, Yosemite National Park, California (c. 1927)
3.  Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941)
4.  The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (1942)
5.  Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California (1944)
6.  Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada, from Lone Pine, California (1944)
7.  Sand Dunes, Sunrise, Death Valley National Monument, California (c. 1948)
8.  Aspens, Northern New Mexico (1958)
9.  Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park, Alaska (1947)
10.  Georgia O'Keeffe and Orville Cox, Canyon de Chelly National Monument, Arizona (1937)

These ten images were chosen by Adams to embody the technical breadth of his Zone System as well as his core aesthetic visual themes.

 

 

#13: Arnold Newman (1918-2006) Ansel Adams outside his home and studio, Carmel, California 1976 gelatin silver photograph Collection National Portrait Gallery Washington Adams was busy printing his last orders before beginning the Museum Set in 1978

#13:  Arnold Newman’s 1976 portrait of Ansel Adams outside his home and studio in Carmel, California brings together two titans of 20th-century American photography. Newman, widely recognized as the father of "environmental portraiture," used his subjects' surroundings, their tools, workspaces, and architectural environments, to reveal their character and life's work.

In 1962, Ansel Adams and his wife Virginia built a striking home and custom studio on a cliffside plot in Carmel Highlands, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Designed with large glass sliding doors, exposed wooden beams, and expansive darkroom facilities, the home served as Adams’s primary workspace, laboratory, and archive during his later years.

When Newman visited Carmel in 1976, Adams was in his mid-70s—a revered elder statesman of American photography who was actively executing major print orders and managing his vast archive. Newman’s portrait is a masterclass in structural framing and symbolic layering:

Adams stands framed precisely within an open sliding glass doorway, leaning casually against a thick timber support. He wears his darkroom apron with glasses pushed up on his forehead, catching him in a natural moment mid-workday. The large glass door reflects the surrounding pine trees and coastal light while simultaneously revealing the interior gallery walls hung with framed prints. This visual layering bridges Adams's inner studio world with the pristine natural environment that inspired his career.

Lush ferns and coastal foliage frame the bottom and sides of the composition. Newman anchors the grand landscape photographer directly within nature, visually echoing Adams’s lifelong commitment to wilderness conservation.

Unlike formal studio headshots, Newman’s approach presents Adams not as a distant, legendary figure, but as an active, pragmatic craftsman dedicated to the physical work of darkroom printing.

#14: Ansel Adams, Silverton Colorado 1951 - not in this exhibitiongelatin silver photograph Plate 4 in Portfolio VI 1974, NGA purchased in 1977 Adams was a fine architectural photographer. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#14:  Ansel Adams’s Silverton, Colorado (1951), often documented as Silverton, Colorado, Mountain Town, is a compelling example of Adams applying his formal landscape vision and Zone System precision to an historic, human-altered environment.

In 1951, Adams was traveling through the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado. Silverton, a historic Victorian-era silver mining town established in the 1870s, sits in a steep, isolated glacial valley over 9,300 feet (2,800 meters) above sea level. Rather than isolating the surrounding peaks as pristine wilderness, Adams framed the town as an integral part of the high-altitude topography:

The photograph contrasts the modest, rectilinear wooden buildings and grid-like street pattern of the mining settlement against the sweeping, immense scale of the San Juan mountain slopes rising sharply in the background.

Shot under crisp mountain light, the print displays remarkable edge-to-edge detail. The dark, weathered wood of the buildings (Zone III–IV) is rendered with subtle texture, contrasting with the bright, sunlit patches of mountain soil and thin alpine air. True to his Group f/64 roots, Adams used a large-format view camera with strong front-and-back tilt controls, keeping both the foreground roofs and the distant mountain ridges in razor-sharp focus.

While Adams is most famous for purely pristine wilderness vistas (like The Tetons and the Snake River), Silverton, Colorado demonstrates his acute eye for cultural geography, documenting how human history embeds itself within dramatic natural landscapes.

#15: Ansel Adams, The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming. 1942.   NASA and a committee led by Carl Sagan selected two photographs by Ansel Adamsthis one and a view of the Golden Gate Bridge from Baker Beach for the Voyager Golden Record aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched in 1977.National Gallery of Australia Collection

#15:  Ansel Adams’s The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (1942) is one of the most famous and widely recognized photographs in art history. Commissioned as part of a major government initiative, the image stands as a quintessential example of Adams's heroic landscape vision and masterly tonal control.

In late 1941, the United States Department of the Interior, under Secretary Harold Ickes, hired Ansel Adams to create a mural-sized photographic record of American National Parks and Indian reservations for the Interior Department Building in Washington, D.C. While traveling through Wyoming in the late summer of 1942, Adams stopped at Deadman's Bar overlooking a sweeping bend of the Snake River, framing the dramatic, glaciated peaks of the Teton Range in the background.

In 1977, NASA selected The Tetons and the Snake River as one of the 115 images placed aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft on the Voyager Golden Record, chosen to represent human culture, natural beauty, and Earth's geography to potential extraterrestrial intelligence. The photograph became a powerful visual tool for environmental conservation, helping to cement public appreciation for Grand Teton National Park and inspiring expanding protections for wilderness areas across the American West.

 

#16: Ansel Adams, Saint Francis Church, Ranchos, DE, Taos, New Mexico c.1929 National Gallery of Australia Collection

#16:  Ansel Adams’s Saint Francis Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico (c. 1929), often documented as San Francisco de Asís Mission Church, is one of his earliest and most iconic architectural studies. The photograph documents a turning point where Adams began shedding his soft-focus Pictorialist roots in favor of the clean, structural clarity that would soon define Group f/64.

In April 1929, Adams traveled to New Mexico at the invitation of arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan and writer Mary Austin. This trip resulted in his celebrated early artist book project, Taos Pueblo (1930). While in the Taos valley, Adams was captivated by the 18th-century Spanish colonial adobe church at Ranchos de Taos. The building was already an iconic motif for artists Georgia O'Keeffe, Paul Strand, and Edward Weston all famously painted or photographed it due to its massive, organic earthen walls and hand-plastered buttresses.

#17: Ansel Adams, Boards and Thistles, San Francisco, California 1932 from Ansel Adams Portfolio VII. A boxed portfolio of 11 gelatin silver photographs and one Polaroid, Parasol Press Ltd, New York, NY, 1976 gelatin silver photograph printed 1976 Purchased 1977. National Gallery of Australia Collection		#18: Ansel Adams, Still life, San Francisco c 1932 from Ansel Adams Portfolio VI. A boxed portfolio of 10 gelatin silver photographs, Parasol Press Ltd, New York, NY, 1974gelatin silver photograph printed c 1974 Purchased 1977. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#17: Ansel Adams’s Boards and Thistles, San Francisco, California (1932) is a pivotal close-up study created during the exact year that marked Adams's total break from soft-focus Pictorialism and his leap into pure Modernism. 1932 was a watershed moment in American photographic history. In November 1932, Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke, and several peers held their inaugural landmark exhibition at the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum in San Francisco, officially launching Group f/64.

The group’s manifesto declared a commitment to "pure or unmanipulated photography", demanding maximum depth of field, razor-sharp focus from edge to edge, and an absolute rejection of painterly or romanticized techniques. Boards and Thistles was created in San Francisco during this precise period of aesthetic realignment and was featured in these foundational early Group f/64 exhibitions.

---

#18: The image shown is actually Ferns and Leaves, Glacier Bay National Monument, Alaska (c. 1948), rather than a studio still life of vessels or pottery. While titled or categorized in some sales and collection records around Portfolio VI with "Still Life" descriptors due to its close-up, tapestry-like framing, it is an iconic outdoor intimate landscape.

Made around 1948 during Adams's work in Alaska under his Guggenheim Fellowship, where he systematically documented national parks and wilderness areas. Adams selected this image for inclusion in Portfolio VI (published in 1974 by Parasol Press in an edition of 110). Portfolio VI was curated to represent the full spectrum of his career, balancing grand vistas (like Aspens, Northern New Mexico) with intricate botanical and textured close-ups. Hand-printed by Adams in his Carmel darkroom for the 1974 portfolio release, the print features deep, velvety blacks in the background shadows that push the bright, luminous fern fronds forward with almost three-dimensional intensity.

 

#19:Ansel Adams, Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California 1923 The only known vintage print shows at this stage that Adams had a softer focus aesthetic and warmer tone. Ansel Adams Estate Collection		#20: Ansel Adams, Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California 1923. from the Ansel Adams Museum Set gelatin silver photograph printed 1980 This is the earliest work in The Museum Set. It is also soft focus with quite shallow perspective. Cold tone development on bright white paper. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#19 - #20: Ansel Adams’s Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California (dated c. 1921–1923) is one of the most significant early works in his career, created when he was around 19 to 21 years old.

It provides an important glimpse into Adams's initial artistic style before he abandoned soft-focus aesthetics in favor of crisp, razor-sharp straight photography.   In the early 1920s, Adams was still deeply influenced by Pictorialism, the international photographic movement that sought to emulate the soft tones, atmospheric mood, and compositional feel of Impressionist paintings and Japanese prints.

Unlike the razor-sharp foreground-to-background clarity of his mature 1930s work, Lodgepole Pines features diffuse, glowing light filtering through delicate forest branches. The trees (often referred to locally as tamarack pines) and ground cover are rendered with soft, dreamlike tonal transitions rather than hard-edged contrast.

This image was selected as one of the 18 photographs included in Adams's very first professional portfolio, organized by San Francisco art patron Albert M. Bender. In that original portfolio, the image was titled A Grove of Tamarack Pine.

Producing and selling the Parmelian Prints portfolio was the turning point that convinced Adams he could make a living as a professional photographer rather than pursuing a career as a concert pianist. Within a few years of its publication, Adams met Paul Strand and Edward Weston, rejected Pictorialism entirely, and co-founded Group f/64 in 1932 to advocate for pure, unmanipulated "straight" photography.

Although made during his early period, Adams recognized Lodgepole Pines as a foundational step in his artistic evolution. He included late silver gelatin prints of the image in several retrospective sets printed in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

 

 

#21: Ansel Adams, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1981 gelatin silver photograph printed 1980A pueblo-style adobe church, a graveyard, a few small buildings, snow covered Sangre de Cristo range behind, and near full moon rising, more than half the picture is the night sky. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#21: In reference to Ansel Adams’ Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, the date 1981 typically refers to the late-career "Museum Set" prints (or official posters and publications issued by the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust).    Adams made the original exposure on November 1, 1941, while driving through the Chama River Valley in New Mexico.

Near the end of his life, Adams ceased taking individual print orders and established a project to produce "Museum Sets", curated portfolios of his finest images for institutions and major collectors. Prints made during this 1980–1981 period represent the culmination of his technical refinement.

Unlike the mid-gray, soft-sky early prints of the 1940s and 1950s, prints produced in 1981 feature Adams's definitive late interpretation: intense chemical re-intensification, heavy burning, and extreme contrast, yielding a pitch-black, velvety sky that causes the moon, clouds, and graveyard crosses to glow with dramatic brilliance.

1981 was also the year the New York Graphic Society and the Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust issued the widely famous, official exhibition poster and lithograph edition designed by Stephen Harvard, which popularized the image globally.

 

#22: Jim Alinder photograph of Ansel Adams with straight and fine prints of Moonrise.You can see the difference between a straight print and one worked up. Adams made about 1300 Moonrise prints.

#22: Jim Alinder, a photographer, director of The Friends of Photography, and close friend of Adams, captured the legendary photographer playfully confronting his own creative evolution. His iconic 1978 photograph captures Ansel Adams in his home studio in Carmel, California, holding up two noticeably different silver gelatin prints of his most famous image, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico (1941).

By the late 1970s, Moonrise had become an international phenomenon and the most sought-after art photograph in history. Adams had made the original exposure in November 1941, but over the following four decades, his interpretation of the negative evolved dramatically. Early prints made by Adams in the 1940s and early 1950s (often referred to as "Straight" or early-stage prints) were soft, with a subtle gray sky and delicate contrast, reflecting the raw exposure on the original negative.

By the late 1960s and 1970s, Adams perfected his darkroom techniques, intensely re-intensifying the negative with chemical baths and using heavy "dodging and burning." This resulted in his late, definitive "Fine" prints: deep, pitch-black skies that made the moon, glowing clouds, and white crosses in the cemetery pop with luminous, theatrical intensity.

Alinder's photograph became one of the most famous behind-the-scenes portraits of Ansel Adams ever taken. It is frequently reproduced in photographic histories and exhibition catalogs to illustrate how darkroom technique, visualization, and silver printing methods changed across 20th-century American photography.

#23: Max Dupain, Sydney Opera House at night 1969 Dupain self elected to photograph the entire construction of the building. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#23: Max Dupain’s 1969 night photograph of the Sydney Opera House stands as one of his most theatrical architectural studies, capturing the building during a critical transition period when the exterior shell structures were fully realized while the interiors were still under heavy construction.

Taken six years after Jørn Utzon’s departure in 1966 and four years prior to the venue's official opening in 1973, Dupain’s 1969 night study transformed the site into a dramatic stage set. Dupain positioned his camera across the water at Bennelong Point, using long exposures to record stark floodlighting against the night sky.

Beyond formal assignments for public authorities, Dupain made a personal commitment to document the Sydney Opera House across its entire construction lifespan from 1959 to 1973. His self-initiated archive systematically recorded every major phase of construction: from the pouring of the podium foundations, through the complex erection of the precast concrete arch ribs, to the custom tiling of the sails and final interior fit-outs.

Because Dupain returned voluntarily to photograph the site under various lighting conditions, weather patterns, and angles, his self-directed body of work forms the most comprehensive, artistically rigorous visual record of the Sydney Opera House’s creation.

#24: Jill White, Max with Linhoff 1983

#24: Jill White’s 1983 portrait of Max Dupain with his Linhof camera is one of the most intimate and celebrated portraits of the legendary Australian photographer in his later years. Jill White was a respected Australian photographer, author, and close personal friend of Max Dupain. In 1983, when Dupain was nearly 70 years old, White spent time documenting him at work and in his personal environment.

The photograph captures Dupain paired with his primary tool of trade: his large-format Linhof Technika field camera mounted on a heavy tripod. The Linhof was central to Dupain's working method, a precision German instrument that required painstaking setup, slow deliberation, and exact technical control to produce the crisp, razor-sharp black-and-white prints for which he was famous.

#25: Max Dupain, Ripples and reeds c 1928  vintage print Purchased 1982 National Gallery of Australia Collection

#25: Ripples and Reeds (c. 1928) holds a special place in Max Dupain’s oeuvre as one of his earliest documented photographs, taken when he was just 17 years old. It provides an important glimpse into Dupain's formative transition from teenage amateur to Australia's premier modern photographer.

In 1924, for his 13th birthday, Dupain was given a simple box camera by his father, George Dupain. He soon joined the NSW Camera Club, where the dominant aesthetic of the era was Pictorialism, a movement that favored soft focus, painterly qualities, gentle tonal gradations, and romanticized nature studies.Ripples and Reeds was created during this initial pictorialist phase.

Sited along a quiet shoreline, likely around the coastal lagoons or Sydney harbour enclaves where he spent his youth, the image captures light shimmering across moving water intermingled with vertical reed stalks.

Dupain considered Ripples and Reeds significant enough to include in retrospective selections of his career. Most notably, it appears as Plate 2 in Gael Newton's seminal 1980 monograph Max Dupain (published by David Ell Press), placed right at the opening of his chronology to illustrate the starting point of his photographic journey before his radical turn toward the New Photography and European Modernism in the 1930s.

 

#26: Max Dupain, Sunbaker c 1938 Culburra Beach, New South Wales,variant pose from the 1948 publication – Max Dupain Photographs.Negative now lost . National Gallery of Australia Collection		#27: Max Dupain, Sunbaker c 1938 Culburra Beach, New South Wales,  printed c 1975. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#26: There is a small print in the "Vandyke Album" in the Max Dupain Archive at the State Library of NSW.
Except for the one in that album and the one printed in the 1948 publication, no other versions of this print have survived. This one, the photo with the clasped hand, was Max Dupain's preferred version. The sole print of this version is in this album and the negative is lost.

#27: Whereas, there are thought to be about 200 signed prints of the better known version (#27 above) where the right hand lies with fingers extended on the sand. This version was largely unknown until it was shown at the Australian Centre for Photography in the 1975 exhibition, Max Dupain: A Retrospective 1930-1975. Taken in 1937 at Culburra Beach on the South Coast of NSW, this version of the image sat in Dupain's private files for decades. Dupain printed the famous relaxed-hand version from his secondary negative specifically for the 1975 ACP retrospective,making the photograph an Australian icon. And the rest is history....

#28: Max Dupain, Silos Pyrmont, vintage print 1935. National Gallery of Australia Collection		#29: Max Dupain, Silos Pyrmont, printed 1980s. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#28 - 29: Max Dupain’s photographs of the Pyrmont Silos (taken around 1933–1935) represent a watershed moment in Australian art history. They marked a decisive departure from the prevailing, soft-focus "Pictorialist" tradition and signaled the arrival of New Photography and European-inspired Modernism in Australia.

In the early 1930s, young Australian artists were looking toward the European avant-garde, specifically the New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement in Germany and the functional aesthetics of the Bauhaus. Modernists like Le Corbusier famously declared industrial grain silos to be "the magnificent first-fruits of the new age."

Inspired by these international trends and publications like Das Deutsche Lichtbild, the 22-year-old Dupain turned his camera toward Sydney's industrial landscape, treating functional industrial architecture as fine art. Dupain photographed the vast concrete grain silos along the Pyrmont wharves (associated with the Colonial Sugar Refining company and wheat export terminals) with a sharp, geometric clarity.

Dupain typically shot from low viewpoints, tilting the camera upward so the cylindrical towers soared diagonally across the frame. He used harsh midday sunlight to cast deep, dramatic shadows against the bright concrete surfaces, emphasizing the repeating curves, rhythm, and raw physical mass of the structures. Replacing the romanticized, hazy tones of earlier Australian photography, Dupain utilized crisp, edge-to-edge detail, turning functional engineering into a striking abstract pattern.

Dupain used the Pyrmont Silos images to prove that beauty in photography did not require pastoral landscapes or idealized human subjects. Industrial utility itself possessed an inherent, heroic beauty.  The images helped redefine urban Sydney's identity, transitioning it from an outpost of the British Empire into a modern, industrial Pacific metropolis

Vintage gelatin silver prints of Dupain's Pyrmont Silos are held in major public institutions, including the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) and the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra.

 

#30: Max Dupain, Seidler & Associates architecture firm Australian Embassy, Paris, June 1978, Gift of the Philip Morris Arts Grant 1982 National Gallery of Australia Collection		#31: Max Dupain, Stairwell, ANZ Regional Proof Centre, Lidcombe, August 1975. Purchased 1983 National Gallery of Australia Collection

#30: Commissioned in 1973 and completed in 1977, the Australian Embassy in Paris (located at 4 Rue Jean Rey in the 15th arrondissement) is one of Harry Seidler’s most significant international works. Designed in collaboration with master structural engineer Pier Luigi Nervi and Marcel Breuer as a consulting architect, the complex sits on a prominent triangular site just steps from the Seine and the Eiffel Tower.

---

#31: The ANZ Regional Proof Centre in Lidcombe, New South Wales (completed around 1975), is an important example of Harry Seidler & Associates’ approach to functional, light-industrial modernism. Unlike Seidler’s high-profile CBD commercial towers (such as Australia Square or the MLC Centre) or iconic private residences, the Proof Centre was designed as a heavy-use banking operational facility, specifically built to house high-speed check processing, proofing operations, and administrative support. The ANZ Regional Proof Centre holds a distinctive place in Australian architectural history, largely due to Seidler’s long-standing collaboration with photographer Max Dupain.

Dupain documented the building in August 1975. His famous photograph, "Stairwell, ANZ Regional Proof Centre, Lidcombe" (capturing a brick arch, deep shadows, and a gleaming curved handrail descending into light), is considered a masterpiece of Australian modernist architectural photography.

 

#32: Max Dupain: Harry Seidler's Bowden House, Deakin, Canberra, August 1954 gelatin silver photograph interior of the lounge room. National Gallery of Australia Collection		#33: Max Dupain: Harry Seidler's Bowden House, Deakin, Canberra, August 1954 gelatin silver photograph exterior night view National Gallery of Australia Collection

#32 - #33: Designed in 1951 and completed in 1952, the Bowden House, Deakin is Harry Seidler’s first residential commission in the Australian Capital Territory. Built for high-ranking public servant Brian Bowden and his wife, it stands as a landmark example of mid-century International Style modernism tailored to Canberra's distinct topography and climate.

The building’s defining silhouette is its inverted pitch (butterfly) roof structure, designed to open up views towards Parliament House and the surrounding hills while drawing winter sunlight deep into the living spaces. Following the Bauhaus space-planning principles Seidler learned under Marcel Breuer, the house separates active social areas (living, dining, kitchen) from quiet sleeping zones using an entry courtyard and glazed passage.

Seidler paired heavily textured local stone masonry walls with light frame construction, large expanses of glass, and timber paneling, establishing a striking contrast between raw stone anchoring the site and cantilevered geometric forms. Designed long before sustainable design became mainstream, the north-facing glass walls and projected roof eaves optimize passive solar heat gain during cold Canberra winters while shielding interior spaces from summer sun.

The property was documented shortly after completion by Max Dupain, whose crisp black-and-white images brought the house international recognition in publications like Architectural Record. Recognized as a seminal work in Australian modernism, the Bowden House is listed on the ACT Heritage Register and nominated to the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (RAIA) Register of Nationally Significant Twentieth Century Architecture.

#34: Max Dupain, Harry Seidler architecture NSW Housing Commission Apartments, Rosebery, New South Wales, June 1967 gelatin silver photograph printed 1970s National Gallery of Australia Collection		#35: Max Dupain, Harry Seidler architecture Printers Union, Sydney, exterior (since demolished), January 1959 gelatin silver photograph printed 1970s National Gallery of Australia Collection

#34: Max Dupain’s photographs of Harry Seidler’s Housing Commission Apartments in Rosebery, New South Wales (commissioned and shot in June 1967) document one of Seidler’s most significant social housing experiments.

Commissioned by the Housing Commission of New South Wales during a period of urban consolidation in Sydney’s inner-south, Seidler applied the same rigorous design standards to low-cost public housing that he did to high-end private residences. Rather than constructing a monolithic, inward-looking block, Seidler arranged the apartments to maximize sunlight, natural cross-ventilation, and visual privacy. The design incorporated split-level planning, open access galleries, and integrated communal open space.

When Dupain arrived at Rosebery in June 1967 to document the newly completed development, he approached the public housing blocks with the same monumentality he brought to commercial towers like Australia Square. Dupain focused on the strong geometric lines of the open walkways, projecting balconies, and stair wells, transforming low-cost concrete modules into a rhythmic grid of light and shadow.

Shooting under crisp winter sunlight, Dupain used deep blacks and clean whites to emphasize the depth of the balcony recesses and the textured concrete surfaces. The collaboration on the Rosebery Apartments remains a classic example of how Seidler and Dupain jointly shaped the visual identity of postwar Sydney.

---

#35:  Max Dupain’s photographs of Harry Seidler’s Printers Union Building (the Printing and Kindred Industries Union, or PKIU) at 252 Clarence Street, Sydney (designed 1956, completed 1958-1959), document a pivotal early commercial project in Seidler’s career.

The building stood out in Sydney’s CBD for its uncompromising International Style approach, applying high-level architectural refinement to a mid-rise union headquarters.

The Printers Union Building remains an important milestone in Seidler’s transition from residential modernism to dense urban commercial work in Sydney. Dupain’s photographs of the building are held in major public collections, including the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) and the State Library of New South Wales, serving as primary historical records of Sydney's mid-century urban transformation.

The Printers Union Building was demolished in the mid-1980s (circa 1985–1986).

 

#36: Max Dupain: Julian Rose House 1954 National Gallery of Australia Collection		#37: Eric Sierins photographer: Harry Seidler with Max Dupain at Rose Seidler House 1991 Max Dupain & Associates. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#36 - #37: Three houses form what is known as the Seidler Family Estate (or the Rose Seidler House Group), a bushland compound on Clissold Road in Wahroonga, Sydney.   Harry Seidler acquired the 6.5-hectare site in 1948 and designed three distinct modernist residences arranged around a central S-shaped driveway and shared communal areas.

1. Rose Seidler House (1948–1950): Designed as the centerpiece for his parents, Max and Rose Seidler. It is Australia's most famous example of mid-century International Modernism, featuring a elevated "floating" box, Marcel Breuer-inspired binuclear floor plan, and expansive floor-to-ceiling glass walls. It is now preserved as a public house museum.
2. Marcus Seidler House (1951–1954) (later known as the Teplitzky House): Built for Harry’s brother, Marcus Seidler, and his family. Sited to the north of the main house, it shared the same structural logic of exposed stone walls and elevated living platforms integrated into the natural slope.
3. Rose House (1949–1954) (often called the Julian Rose House): Designed for Harry's close friend and client, Julian Rose (unrelated to his mother Rose). Positioned to the south, this compact house features a dramatic steel-frame glass pavilion suspended above a stone foundation, cantilevered over the bushland terrain.

 

 

 

#38: Alan Ross photographer, Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham 1975. The Ansel Adams Gallery

#38: Alan Ross’s 1975 portrait captures a playful moment between two giants of American photography and founding members of Group f/64: Ansel Adams and Imogen Cunningham.

In early 1975, Imogen Cunningham (then in her early 90s) visited Ansel Adams at his home in Carmel, California, on assignment for People magazine to take his portrait. Cunningham kept insistently demanding that while she was photographing him, Adams ought to take her portrait as well. Busy and somewhat reluctant, Adams repeatedly tried to decline. After continuous banter, Adams finally relented, telling his assistant, Alan Ross, "Alan, go get the Hasselblad".

As Adams resigned himself to setting up the camera to photograph Cunningham, Ross, standing nearby with camera in hand, quietly snapped this candidate frame. The resulting image shows Adams grinning into Ross's lens while holding his Hasselblad fitted with a view-bellows attachment, while Cunningham looks on intently from the background gardens. It captures the warm camaraderie, sharp wit, and decades-long friendship between two foundational figures of 20th-century straight photography.

 

#39: Max Dupain, Surf Edge 1950 purchased 1979. National Gallery of Australia Collection

#39: Max Dupain’s Surf Edge (1950) is an example of his mid-century graphic abstraction, demonstrating how he applied structural modernist principles to the organic, fluid environment of the Australian coastline.

By 1950, Dupain’s studio work was transitioning heavily toward commercial and architectural photography, most notably through his long-term collaboration with architect Harry Seidler. Works like Surf Edge illustrate how his eye for structural formalism, developed through documenting concrete, steel, and architectural planes, continually informed his personal studies of the Australian beach landscape.

#40: Ansel Adams, Surf Sequence, San Mateo County Coast, California c. 1940 National Gallery of Australia Collection		#41: Ansel Adams, Surf Sequence, San Mateo County Coast, California c. 1940 National Gallery of Australia Collection

#40-#41: Ansel Adams’ Surf Sequence, San Mateo County Coast, California (c. 1940) is one of the most innovative and important portfolio experiments in his vast career, marking a significant departure from his grand, solitary grand-landscape vistas like Moonrise, Hernandez or Monolith.

The series is a textbook demonstration of Adams's Zone System. The deep black tone of the wet sand (Zone I–II) contrasts sharply with the delicate, luminous white foam (Zone VIII–IX), retaining full detail in both the highlights and deep shadows.

Surf Sequence is widely praised by photo historians because it shows Adams engaging with themes of transience and micro-detail, proving his vision was not restricted solely to static, heroic mountain peaks.

Adams selected the five images to be presented together as a coherent unit in his celebrated Portfolio Two: The National Parks and Monuments (1950) and subsequent major retrospectives.

The compositional strategy, isolating the foam margin against wet sand, bears a striking conceptual resemblance to Max Dupain’s later coastal abstractions, such as Surf Edge (1950), illustrating how mid-century modernists across the Pacific were independently exploring the graphic rhythms of the shoreline.

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.

Modernist and Majestic: Gael Newton talk August 2026

More on Max Dupain

Essays by Gael Newton AM

photo-web contents page

Wikipedia entry on Anne Brigman