'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.'
Source: Publisher's blurb.
'By default, a sound biography becomes a potted history of the decades of its setting. It is also a record of the fading and flourishing mindsets, fashions and technologies of the time. Readers of a certain generation will fondly recall the Kodak Box Brownie camera with its convex rectangular window and the concentrated delight of collecting a modest, brown-paper envelope of photos from the local chemist a few days later. The black-and-white results were more often than not lopsided, out of focus and sometimes cut off people’s heads.' (Introduction)
'By default, a sound biography becomes a potted history of the decades of its setting. It is also a record of the fading and flourishing mindsets, fashions and technologies of the time. Readers of a certain generation will fondly recall the Kodak Box Brownie camera with its convex rectangular window and the concentrated delight of collecting a modest, brown-paper envelope of photos from the local chemist a few days later. The black-and-white results were more often than not lopsided, out of focus and sometimes cut off people’s heads.' (Introduction)
