Helen Ennis
Olive Cotton: A life in photography
Harper Collins, 2019
A landmark biography of a singular and important Australian photographer, Olive Cotton, by an award-winning writer – beautifully written and deeply moving.
Olive Cotton was one of Australia’s pioneering modernist photographers, a woman whose talent was recognised as equal to her first husband’s, Max Dupain, and a significant artist in her own right. Together, Olive and Max could have been Australia’s answer to Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, or Ray and Charles Eames. The photographic work they produced during the 1930s and ’40s was extraordinary and distinctively their own.
But in the early 1940s Cotton quit their marriage and Sydney studio to live with second husband Ross McInerney and raise their two children in a tent on a farm near Cowra – later moving to a hut that had no running water, electricity or telephone. Despite these barriers, and not having access to a darkroom, Olive continued her photography but away from the public eye. Then a landmark exhibition in Sydney in 1985 shot her back to fame, followed by a major retrospective at the AGNSW in 2000. Australian photography would never be same.
This is a moving and powerful story about talent, creativity and women, and about what it means for an artist to manage the competing demands of art, work, marriage, children and family.
2020 Magarey Medal for Biography, Australian Historical Association
2020 University of Queensland Nonfiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards, State Library of Queensland
2020 Canberra Critics Circle Award for Biography
Longlisted for the 2020 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award
“An ‘absorbing biography … As biographer, Ennis must deal not only with the elusiveness of Cotton herself but also with the larger-than-life personalities of the men she married. It is a balancing act to give these two talkative and often charming men their place in the story while keeping Cotton very much in the frame, ever alert to the danger that she will slip into the background. One of the fundamental strengths of Ennis as biographer is that she achieves this difficult balance, giving both men their due and never rushing to simple judgement, while at the same time ensuring that the main light falls consistently on her central subject. As she reminds both herself and the reader at one point, “this is Olive’s story.”
About the Author
Helen Ennis is one of Australia’s leading photography curators, historians and writers.
She joined the Department of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia in 1981 and was Curator of International and Australian Photography at the National Gallery of Australia from 1985-92. She has extensive experience as an independent curator and writer specializing in the area of Australian photographic practice.
Her curatorial projects include Mirror with a memory: Photographic portraiture in Australia (National Portrait Gallery, 2000); a retrospective exhibition of Olive Cotton’s photographs (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000); and the two-part exhibition In a New Light: Australian Photography 1850s-2000 (National Library of Australia 2003 and 2004). Her exhibition of the work of European émigré photographer Margaret Michaelis was shown at the National Gallery of Australia in 2005.
Helen’s publications include Olive Cotton (Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2000), Man with a camera: Frank Hurley overseas (National Library of Australia, 2002), Intersections: Photography, history and the National Library of Australia (National Library of Australia, 2004) and the award-winning biography Margaret Michaelis: love, loss and photography (National Gallery of Australia, 2005). Her book Photography and Australia was published by Reaktion, London, in 2007.
In 2007 she curated Reveries: Photography and Mortality for the National Portrait Gallery and in 2008 curated A Modern Vision: Charles Bayliss, Photographer, 1850-1897 for the National Library of Australia.
