While a substantive amount has been written and published about Max Dupain's photography, there has been no dedicated study of Dupain as a writer – his essays, his art reviews, his personal writing and poems.
He wrote school pieces for The Sydneian. His last piece for the school magazine, written as he left in April 1930 at the height of the Depression, hints at sadness about leaving and uncertainty about his future.
Helen Ennis noted that a few love letters, notes and poems survive from the early stages of his relationship with Olive Cotton from 1928 onwards. Ennis said that he stood apart from other photographers because he wrote a lot, and anyone visiting the archives would be amazed at the number of scribbled pages about his work and about photography.
In 1935 Ure Smith featured his work in Art in Australia and invited him to review J. T. Scoby's book on Man Ray for The Home magazine. His best-known manifesto-style text is a 1938 letter to the Sydney Morning Herald. In it he argued that great art has always been contemporary in spirit, and wished that Australia had the courage of Man Ray and the thinking of Moholy-Nagy.
From the late 1930s he was an important commentator in photography magazines, and later he became the Sydney Morning Herald's photography critic. He held that post in the first half of the 1980s. His writing skill was noticed, as was his encouragement of photographers at every stage, though his idea of "good photography" sometimes divided the photographic community. One of his columns was on Gael Newton's Bicentennial appointment. In it he wrote that her deepest belief was that great photography can produce a mystical experience as profound as great art does.
Max Dupain’s self-declared heroes were Beethoven, Shakespeare, D. H. Lawrence and Llewellyn Powys, and Norman Lindsay's Creative Effort was especially influential.
The NGA's exhibition text quotes him from 1947 saying that as a schoolboy he tried to reconcile mechanically reproduced image with the poetic sentimentality of youth. His love of writing came from his mother and his sixth-form English master, Frederick George "Sandy" Phillips. Phillips was his teacher around the time of the poem – The Tree, and the poem's attack on "science and pride" fits that Lindsay–Lawrence vitalist strain. As an adult he credited his lack of religion to his father's scientific rationalism.
Below are some links to some of Max Dupain's writings - uploaded as we find them...
Reviews:
1985: Photographs 1961–1985 by Robert McFarlane - The Print Room, 141 Dowling St. Woolloomooloo
Early writing:
A Poem: The Tree
more to come.....
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