Max Dupain, page 34
This idea of ‘survival at all costs’, and the involuntary nature of the survival reflex, had underpinned his philosophy of life for forty years and Dupain held on to it as one of the few certainties in his life.
Landscape by night 1, Castlecrag, 1980, Art Gallery of New South Wales, gift of the artist, 1981
Landscapes by night
Taking photographs at night was nothing new for Dupain. In the late 1930s he often ventured out at twilight – he said the best time in Sydney for night photography was half an hour after sunset – on the lookout for pictorial opportunities. He found them all over the city in artificially lit buildings and main roads, the harbour streaked with the ferries’ trails of light, a glowing ocean liner berthed at the docks in Woolloomooloo. At that stage of his career, he was experimenting intensively, developing his skills, expanding his range. The photographs required patience as he learned how to control different kinds of light and long exposures (up to fifteen minutes duration), and the visual effects he obtained are lyrical and suggestive. As he later wrote: ‘Darkness fulfils my eternal quest for simplicity by enveloping unnecessary detail. Mystery prevails.’1
The desire for simplicity and mystery still reigned forty years later when Dupain turned to night photography again, this time in his Castlecrag garden. But in the small group of new images he created, there is no oscillation between fading natural and artificial light. The softness and lyricism have gone, and artificial light and its hardening effects have triumphed, obliterating the gradations of detail visible in earlier images. This is a significant development because Dupain’s night photographs of 1979–82 ask something new of the viewer. Instant apprehension is not the goal. The images are purposefully difficult to read and take time to absorb, and ultimately, in the strongest ones, nothing quite makes sense visually. The material and surface qualities of the rocks and vegetation are described but so much else is lost to us, swamped by looming black shapes that expunge detail. Landscapes by night is an unusual instance in which Dupain’s rational and romantic sides work together actively, productively and wondrously.
The wonders of flowers
In the Dupains’ garden at Castlecrag native species of plants were supreme, reflecting the Griffins’ vision for a suburb in the bush that involved preserving remnant bushland and enhancing it with new plantings of natives. But when it came to choosing flowers to photograph, Dupain had no such agenda – his preferred subjects were exotics rather than Australian species. The exotics he photographed were diverse and included proteas, orchids, lilies, azaleas, hibiscuses, dahlias, succulents and magnolias, along with camellias that Jill White’s mother grew at Wirruna in Hornsby. His favourite natives were the spectacular waratah and flowers of the firewheel tree. The predominance of exotics is significant, for it challenges the identification of Dupain with Australian nationalism, Australian subject matter and an Australian style of photography.
When Dupain started photographing flowers in the late 1930s, they were a very gendered category in Australian art, typically associated with women and the domestic sphere, and especially with flower arranging, which was referred to as an art but generally contextualised in terms of design. The artists Margaret Preston and Thea Proctor published an article, ‘The gentle art of arranging flowers’, in The Home magazine in June 1924, in which Proctor proposed that ‘a flower arrangement should be a design’. In her view, the flower arranger, like a designer, should be cognisant of the interaction of flowers and leaves with ‘the vase or bowl, the colour scheme of the room, and particularly of the walls’.1 Proctor used only exotics in her artworks, whereas Preston, the most important flower painter and printmaker in the interwar years, depicted both exotics and natives. However, she used natives – especially the instantly recognisable banksia flowers – as part of her campaign for a national art. Male artists chose flowers as their subject less frequently, the best known exception being Adrian Feint, who built his reputation on paintings of flowers, but he too favoured exotics.
Dupain’s exploration of the art photography of flowers owes far more to international precedents than Australian, and to photography rather than other art forms. He was familiar with the German photographers Karl Blossfeldt and Albert Renger-Patzsch, whose photographs of flowers and plants were often published in the magazines and books he acquired in the 1930s. It is also no coincidence that Man Ray produced wonderful photographs of flowers (usually close-ups), five of which were illustrated in the Soby monograph Dupain reviewed in 1935. Two years later Dupain made a solarisation of an orchid that he described as being in the ‘Man Ray Manner’. The orchids, lilies and magnolias Man Ray photographed all became favourite subjects of Dupain’s. In Olive Cotton’s work, too, in the second half of the 1930s flower studies became a vital part of her art practice, but they differ from Dupain’s in their sensuousness and emphasis on soft, organic forms. Also, Cotton preferred more ordinary exotic garden plants to hothouse varieties, favouring Shasta daisies, plum blossoms and poppies.
While Dupain’s experiments with solarisation and other techniques used by Man Ray were transitory, his flower studies persisted. They resurfaced in the 1970s as a renewed area of focus and from this point onwards were regularly exhibited and published, culminating in the Flower Portfolio issued by The Print Room in 1991. In this same period American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of flowers (both colour and black and white) achieved a high level of visibility.
Dupain’s later flower studies belong to the category of straight (rather than experimental or manipulated) photography and relate to his still lifes, rather than his photographs of landscape and other natural elements such as trees and rocks. Few were taken in situ, in garden, park or bush settings, but were set up in the studio, where Dupain meticulously arranged the picked blooms in front of his large-format camera. As with his still lifes of inanimate objects, nothing has been left to chance. In the early 1980s, however, Dupain introduced another strand to his flower photography, producing a series of pictures of his Castlecrag garden at night.
Monstera deliciosa, 1970, courtesy of Jill White
What is most striking about the studio flower studies is their sculptural, monumental quality; like a nude body, like a building, like an object, they too were approached as form. The clarity and strength of the form mattered as Dupain generally photographed a single bloom (occasionally two, but rarely more than that) on a black background, eliminating any environmental context. His intention was, he said, ‘to prevent the distraction of superfluous elements and to concentrate exclusively on the form of the flower’.2 The flower quite literally had to stand alone. For dramatic effect he relied on point of view, control of light, and use of magnification. The exhibition prints were of a scale that ‘invites the viewer to coexist on the same level as his horticultural subjects’,3 not to exert their dominance over them.
Dupain always chose flower forms that were perfect. He rejected blooms that were damaged, bruised or already withering, which in vanitas paintings are used symbolically to remind viewers of the brevity of earthly life. Instead, Dupain only wanted specimens that were (however briefly) at the peak of their vitality and perfection. And yet, they do not appear as animate forms – everything about them is stilled, not to suggest fragility or precariousness in the face of imminent collapse and irreversible decay, but the opposite. Untouched by wind, cold or heat, the flowers in Dupain’s photographs are frozen in an unchanging state of being.
The flower studies have attracted little critical or popular discussion, but they warrant more attention. They represent more than simply taking control of a new genre, mastering and masculinising it, and constitute one of the most personal groups of images in his entire body of artworks. Jill White encapsulated this personal dimension in her observation that Dupain’s flower photography enabled him ‘to release some of his inner emotional self’.4 In his photographs of perfect orchid, lily and magnolia blooms, his quest for beauty, purity and permanence was realised. In them, time stands still.
The flowers are closely aligned to the shells Dupain also frequently photographed – sometimes lying just where he discovered them, sometimes arranged in rock pools or on the sand, and sometimes extracted from their natural settings and taken into the studio. While the variety of their forms was important, they did not have to be perfect – being sea- and weather-worn was acceptable. Also, in comparison with the flower specimens, the shells were used more deliberately to invoke the complexity of nature. Of a close-up shot of a spiralling interior of a shell (Shell series, no. 6, 1952), Dupain wrote: ‘This tiny shell, about twenty millimetres in diameter, was photographed in the studio and blown up to about twenty times. The emphasis is on the wonder of design and symmetry in nature.’5
During their twenty-year professional relationship Jill White took many photographs of Dupain at work, both at the studio and on location when portraiture, architectural and other sessions were in process. Most of the shots are candid, achieved with less posturing and less self-consciousness on Dupain’s part than in the ubiquitous media shots, but White also produced a group of more formal portraits. Max Dupain with magnolia (1983) belongs to this latter group.
The photograph has a triangular composition in which three elements are entwined – Dupain himself, his large-format Linhof camera (which will ensure his negative has the maximum amount of detail) and a dainty single flower. He is at the apex of the triangle, while the camera and flower occupy the lower left and right corners respectively. White shows Dupain fully immersed in setting up his flower study, tenderly positioning the thin-stalked bloom in front of the camera lens. The gentle light that falls on the flower, his arm and forehead has a softening effect, a suggestion of intimacy enhanced by the dark background that conceals any distracting detail.
Jill White, Max Dupain with magnolia, 1983, National Library of Australia
This is a portrait that benefits from the understanding between photographer and subject. Dupain was at ease in White’s familiar presence – he trusted her and, in her portraits of him, was prepared to show a side of himself he kept hidden from others. In Max Dupain with magnolia, her most tender homage, she valorised his sensitivity and, in doing so, affirmed his belief in the value of creative effort. Dupain had long been convinced that his art photography had ‘to be contained in another part of one’s being where it won’t be contaminated by [commercial] work’. Within the sympathetic studio environment that he and White had established, with ‘no art directors in sight’, he could indulge his creativity. If all went well, he experienced what he described as ‘a wonderful feeling of freedom and personal involvement at a high emotional level that really elevates you to a sublime plane only reached by the supersensitive’.6 White’s portrait of Dupain can be seen as a visualisation of the effort required for him to attain that elevated state.
‘Notes from within’
As Dupain’s archive at the State Library of New South Wales reveals, the titles he favoured for his writing are mostly descriptive, not allusive. ‘Notes from within’, which applies to a few typed-up pages, is unusually suggestive. The document’s content differs from most others, too, in its philosophical orientation. It probably dates from the early 1980s, when Dupain was writing a lot as a reviewer, musing about photography and art, and being called on to publicly express his views at exhibition openings, book launches and in media interviews. He was a prolific writer and wrote everything in longhand, down to the last detail, before it was typed up by Jill White. In his speeches, for example, nothing was left to chance – his texts end with details such as ‘I now declare this exhibition open’. Being well prepared was obviously essential.
In ‘Notes from within’ the following crucial statement appears: ‘I can’t overemphasise the fact that it all has to come from within. That’s where it must start – then something happens – there comes a correlation between the feeling and something seen. Your heart leaps up and there is born instantly a sympathetic give and take between the idea and the reality.’1 The reference to T.S. Eliot’s ‘The hollow men’ in the words ‘between the idea and the reality’ is surely not accidental.
This view of photography as an internal and ineffable process involving both the intellect and emotion is corroborated by fragments in other texts in his archive. On another occasion, for example, Dupain wrote: ‘The idea is all that matters: I have always emphasised heart and mind above optics, chemicals, film speeds, and . . . computerised cameras. This all stinks of materialism – nothing to do with art or art photography.’2 Photographs, he said, are ‘distillations of emotional experience. They are not illustrations of material objects and they are not mechanical representations of seen things.’3 He explained in a 1979 letter that ‘I carry the image of an idea with me for a long time’.4 And, in a further variation on the theme in a 1990 interview, he said: ‘My main objective is to come up with some distillation of what has been photographed . . . not a bare factual statement but an interpretation . . . it comes through firstly a feeling . . . then [I] apply mechanics. There’s a lot of control in those mechanics to prop up that philosophy.’5
‘Notes from within’ also broaches Dupain’s preoccupation in this period with photography’s status as art. His predicament was heartfelt – he claims he has yet to experience seeing a photograph that affects him with the same emotional power as great works of art in other media. To his disappointment, he invariably finds photography wanting.
… I find great solace and inspiration in . . . classical music. I often have to make comparisons with great music and photography just to get my perspectives in order. Listen to . . . the Andante of the Fourth Beethoven Piano Concerto – dramatic interchange of serenity and majesty; sum up its total significance and try and think of one photograph or any group of photographs that get anywhere near that degree of significance. I cannot. If photography is to be considered in that awful bloody, puny term ‘an art in its own right’ it must stand or fall by comparison with its sister arts, music, drama, sculpture, literature, painting.6
This is a topic he revisits time and again. In another handwritten document he rhetorically asks himself: ‘Is this all photography is capable of doing? I have long given up hope of finding a photographer to pour out his heart like Goya or Rembrandt or [Constantin] Brancusi or [Marcel] Duchamp. They have no heart, or it is the restrictive elements of photography that prohibit it.’7 Paradoxically, despite his ongoing calls for a full immersion in the arts, Dupain himself was very selective about what he looked at and listened to, and did not make the pilgrimages to view artworks in European and American art collections that were standard for artists in this period. The solution he finally settled on was rigid. Photographs were not to be judged in relation to works of art in other media after all, but in relation to other photographs.
And yet, despite his doubts, he is certain about what constitutes greatness in photography. The great photographer, he states in 1976, must be able to see ‘in a very special way in accord with your whole self, your birthright, your education, your nervous system, your physical being, your reflexes and all that go to make up the intensity of a man or woman’. When this successfully coalesces, ‘something arises like the Phoenix, if you like, in the photograph, which is supremely honest and individual’. In the same piece he writes:
It’s reminiscent of the argument about evolution between D.H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. The former was a passionate disbeliever in anything to do with science or the reality of evolution was to him a non existent thing. ‘But look at the evidence, Lawrence’, insisted Huxley, ‘just look at all the evidence.’ The characteristic reply was, ‘I don’t care about evidence. Evidence does not mean anything to me. I don’t feel it HERE!’ and he pressed his two hands on his solar plexus.8
Dupain stood with Lawrence, not with Huxley.
As for great photographs, he proclaimed that they must not be ‘mere illustrations of the world scene, but distillations of observations of unique subjects and their impact on . . . [a photographer’s] innermost feelings . . . the interpretation of these elements in his own terms of heart and mind . . . Just that.’9
‘Notes from within’ does not canvass Dupain’s attitude to photography theory, but he stridently expressed his objections to it in other texts. Ironically, for a committed rationalist (with overtly anti-science and romantic leanings), he objected to theory, derogatorily labelling it ‘humbug’. He and David Moore shared their detestation of ‘humbug and the deflection of intent’, and in 1980 he bemoaned that ‘the art world is full of them both – particularly in the swirling red tape of art criticism. Now that photography has burgeoned and become an established medium of emotional and intellectual communication, the humbug bit is white-anting its way into its vitals.’10 In his opinion, the American critic Susan Sontag (he called her ‘Suzy’), author of the very influential book On Photography (1976), and New York Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski were guilty of ‘bloody humbug’11 in their writings on photography. The way Dupain saw it, a polarity exists between those who analyse or theorise photographs and those who take them, and he had no doubt about which position is superior: ‘The former [the critic] sits in esoteric splendour and regurgitates the product of his visual digestion. The photographer activates the scene on his own terms and produces a statement of graphic validity. In other words he gets out there and does it.’12
