About

From multi-award-winning writer Helen Ennis comes the first ever biography of the photographer Max Dupain, the most influential Australian photographer of the 20th century and creator of many iconic images that have passed into our national imagination.

Max Dupain (1911-1992) was a major cultural figure in Australia, and at the forefront of the visual arts in a career spanning more than fifty years. During this time he produced a number of images now regarded as iconically Australian. He championed modern photography and a distinctive Australian approach.

To date, Dupain has been seen mostly in one-dimensional, limited and limiting terms - as exceptional, as super masculine, as an Australian hero. But this landmark biography approaches him as a complex and contradictory figure who, despite the apparent certitude of his photographic style, was filled with self-doubt and anxiety. Dupain was a Romantic and a rationalist and struggled with the intensity of his emotions and reactions. He wanted simplicity in his art and life, but found it difficult to attain. He never wanted to be ordinary.

Examining the sources of his creativity - literature, art, music - alongside his approaches to masculinity, love, the body, war, and nature, Max Dupain: A Portrait reveals a driven artist, one whose relationship to his work has been described as ‘ferocious’ and ‘painful to watch’. Photographer David Moore, a long-term friend, said he ‘needed to photograph like he needed to breathe. It was part of him. It gave him his drive and force in life.’

  • 528 pages
  • ISBN: 9781460716717
  • Published by Fourth Estate, an imprint of Harper Collins

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Reviews

‘Three worlds: a new biography of Max Dupain’, Elisa deCourcy, Australian Book Review, January-February 2025, pp.67-68 (paywall)

[Ennis’s] credentials as a biographer, curator and photo historian open the possibility for a new reading of Dupain’s work against the somewhat tumultuous world of his personal life and the often racist and patriarchal landscape of Australian cultural politics … There is a careful, measured craft to Ennis’s writing. She peels back the different strata of Dupain’s existence, blowing the sand from the abstraction, but refrains from arriving at moralising or finite assessments of the man himself. … Ennis demonstrates that the role of the feminist biographer and art historian is not confined to revering the lost or marginalised practices of women artists (although there is certainly much work to be done on that front). She shows that an important task lies in confronting the larger-than-life male figures of Australian art: revisiting their work alongside its ‘autobiographical, social, cultural and historical moorings’.’

‘The best Australian books of 2024’, Susan Wyndham, The Guardian, 16 December 2024

The dust jacket of this handsome biography, showing a charismatic young Dupain, peels away to expose the eminent Australian photographer’s iconic 1930s image, Sunbaker. Inside, a more complex man and career are revealed in lucid prose by Ennis, a leading historian of photography. … she finds Dupain (1911-1992) was a creative, driven photographer shaped by self-doubt, war, beach culture, modernism, literature, music and commerce. Ennis dug deeply into his archive and sets his first biography against absorbing history and examination of famous and unknown images.

Martyn Jolly, ‘A different kind of Australian masculinity: the fractured life of influential photographer Max Dupain’, The Conversation, 11 December 2024

… this book is not about icons, or fame or national identity. It’s about the dreams, loves, desires, doubts, angers, fears, and creative yearnings of an Australian man – not the “quintessential” or “typical” Australian man some may (mistakenly) take Sunbaker to represent, but a man whose fractured life, presented here through a series of beautifully nuanced readings of some of his photographs … tells us something relevant about Australia and Australian masculinity.

… Ennis … homes in on the “undefinitive”, life’s glitches that lesser biographers would smooth over. She likes historical puzzles, and these ultimate unknowables about people and the past drive the reader’s investment in the book.

This revelatory book is a portrait of a man who thought he was different to the rest of us but was then troubled by the self-doubt that perhaps he wasn’t after all.

It’s a portrait of man driven to elevate himself through so much hard creative work that it destroyed the other parts of his life that made him what he was in the first place – some of his relationships, some of his openness, some of his optimism.

It’s a portrait of a man who decided to turn inwards to an idea of Australia for creative sustenance, but then found it could never be enough.

But it’s also about the existence of other types of Australian masculinity, and other types of Australia, types which had been subsumed, ironically, by the likes of Sunbaker. An understanding of these kinds of masculinity is more relevant now than ever.

Nigel Featherstone, ‘Max Dupain: A Portrait by Helen Ennis review – the man who took Australia’s most famous photo’, The Guardian, 8 November 2024

In this thoughtfully structured, readable and in many ways moving biography, Dupain ultimately comes across as someone who spoke against his myth, but also traded on it until the end. … Together with Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography, Ennis’s biography of Dupain forms a major study of what is arguably the most significant period of Australian photographic practice. Eschewing gossip and speculation, Max Dupain: A Portrait focuses on the work, which, when considered as a whole, is diverse, brave, not always successful, but yearns for something that might be considered the truth.

Max Dupain: A Portrait, Non-fiction Book of the Week, Sydney Morning Herald (paywall)

Non-fiction Book Review, Brian Rope, Canberra Critics Circle

‘a detailed and fascinating portrait’

Resources

Book launch – Max Dupain: A Portrait by Helen Ennis, National Library of Australia, 28 November 2024. Helen is in conversation with Alex Sloan.

Helen Ennis, ‘Max Dupain unafraid of death, but unprepared for ageing’, The Australian, 9 November 2024. (paywall)

Helen Ennis, ‘The phoenix’, Extract from Max Dupain: A Portrait, Inside Story, 22 November 2024

Other writing on Max Dupain by Helen Ennis

‘Max Dupain’s dilemmas’, Australian Book Review, November 2021. This essay was Commended in the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize. The full published version is available to subscribers only.

‘Max Dupain’s dilemmas’ - the podcast. A podcast of the ABR Essay, read by Helen, can be heard here.

Helen Ennis, ‘Dupain, Maxwell Spencer (Max) (1911–1992)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, published online 2020. This article was published in hardcopy in Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 19, (ANU Press), 2021

Helen Ennis, Max Dupain Obituary, Art Monthly Australia, September 1992, p.18

Helen Ennis, then Curator of Photography, curated the exhibition Max Dupain: Photographs at the National Gallery of Australia, 16 November 1991 to 27 January 1992. It was accompanied by a 28-page exhibition catalogue, Max Dupain: Photographs (Australian National Gallery, 1991) which includes a Biographical Essay and an Interview with Max Dupain that Helen recorded at his home in Castlecrag, Sydney on 1 August 1991. Both texts are available on the NGA website.