We acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land on which the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art stands and recognise the creative contribution First Australians make to the art and culture of this country.
Max Dupain / Australia 1911–92 / Boy on tractor, Queensland c.1970s, printed 1987 / Gelatin silver photograph / 43.3 x 40.3cm / Gift of CSR Limited through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation 1987 / Collection: Queensland Art Gallery / © Max Dupain / Licensed by Copyright Agency
Max DupainBoy on tractor, Queensland c.1950
Not Currently on Display
CSR Limited, Australia’s major sugar refinery, initiated the CSR Photography Project in 1978 to commemorate their hundredth anniversary. Six photographers recorded different aspects of the refinery’s activities and the lives of employees. Although printed in 1987, Max Dupain’s photographs for the CSR Collection were taken in the 1950s. They document the landscape in Queensland’s sugarcane growing regions, as well as family and working life. In this image, Dupain’s wide angle lens wraps the fertile land around the children and spreads the clear sky above their heads creating ‘an almost nineteenth century vision of pastoral harmony with the modern Australian nuclear family’.1
Endnotes:
1 Martyn Jolly in Christine Godden, CSR Photography Project: Selected works, CSR Limited, Sydney, 1985, unpaginated.
Max Dupain was born in Sydney in 1911. He became interested in photography around the age of 14, and after leaving Sydney Grammar School in 1930, he began a three-year apprenticeship in Cecil Bostock’s photography studio. He also began exhibiting around this time. During the 1930s, Dupain pioneered modern photography in Australia.
By 1938, he had a reputation as a leading commercial photographer in the fields of fashion, advertising and portraiture. Between 1943 and 1944, Dupain was a war photographer, before transferring to the Department of Information, where he undertook a promotional photography assignment focusing on Australia’s postwar recovery, including the experience of immigration.
Max Dupain enjoys an unrivalled position in the history of Australian photography, with his name inextricably linked to images signifying the Australian ethos.