Reviewing The Saturday Paper’s
review of Definitive Dupain the State Library NSW

Mireille Juchau’s review in of Definitive Dupain in The Saturday Paper is a curious piece of work. The argument she builds is not an argument about the exhibition the State Library of New South Wales has mounted.

It is an argument for a different exhibition and unfortunately that exhibition may have already been held by the same institution nine years ago and sent on tour.

The review is headed with a question: ‘why a Max Dupain exhibition, and why now’ and the question is put three times in the body. It is never answered.

BUT the answer is on the first screen of the Library’s own website. The State Library acquired the Max Dupain & Associates archive in 2011 and the exhibition negatives in 2016. What it holds now runs to more than 250,000 commercial and personal negatives and prints spanning a sixty-year working life. This is the first retrospective that could be attempted with both halves of that material under one roof. The curator, Avryl Whitnall, spent five years going through it. The exhibition is free, and it runs from 24 August 2026 to 18 July 2027, a year.

Whitnall’s previous Dupain exhibition at the Library was Max Dupain, Modernist in 2007. Anyone who was a child when that show hung is now in their thirties. The audience for a survey renews itself whether or not the scholarship does. There is a new audience available for this new survey exhibition.

A public institution that acquires a major archive, acquires with it an obligation to show what is in it. This is a condition of custodianship, and it is why state collections exist. So, the answer to ‘why now’ is obvious: because the material is finally all in one place, because the work of going through it is finally done, and because the people who may have seen it before are now joined by the many of  the new generations who would not have a chance to see 200 photographs by Max Dupain.

A central theme of the review is that the Library should have set Dupain in dialogue with the photographers and artists who built on or departed from his vision. Tracey Moffatt’s portrait of David Gulpilil at Bondi is offered, and Anne Zahalka’s restaging of the Sunbaker, and Abdul Abdullah on the Cronulla riots, and Julie Rrap against the idealising male eye.

That exhibition happened. It was called Under the Sun: Reimagining Max Dupain’s Sunbaker, it was an Australian Centre for Photography project, and it was shown at the State Library of New South Wales from 18 February to 17 April 2017 before travelling to Monash Gallery of Art from 6 May to 6 August. Zahalka’s restaging is one of the standing exhibits in that conversation and has been for thirty years.

The other half of her proposal has also had its own show. Man Ray and Max Dupain was at Heide Museum of Modern Art last year; the dialogue with predecessors, given a full exhibition rather than a grid of six comparisons.

The masculinity question Juchau raises in her closing paragraph, through William Yang, and frames as a question the exhibition has ducked, is the organising theme of the principal recent book on Dupain by Helen Ennis that she quotes from four times. Is she telling us that she has read Helen’s book?

Showing what formed a photographer is part of telling that photographer’s story. The grid of six early Dupains set against six European images explains how he came to see as he did: what he read, what he borrowed, what he absorbed and then shed.

Showing who reacted to him afterwards is reception history. In that story Dupain figures not as the subject but as the cause, and the subject photographers such as Zahalka, Moffatt, Rrap. But this 2026 exhibition had its own limits and exhibiting who he influenced is another exhibition – such as the 2017 Centre for Photography exhibition.

The Library’s account of its own show is a claim about range: from Sunbaker to studio portraiture, experimental photography, architecture, advertising, fashion, wartime work, nature and intimate personal photographs. Almost 200 images, many of them prints Dupain selected himself for magazine and book publishers. However, this reviewer made no room to mention the architectural photography, nor the advertising, nor the fashion, nor the industrial work, nor the wartime photographs, nor the nature studies. That is the majority of the exhibition.

The quarter of the show she does review is the quarter that sustains the reading she brought in with her. The Seidler buildings, the camouflage work, the aluminium pots and the toothpaste offer nothing to an argument about the beach and the male eye, and so they are not mentioned.

There is the question (probably unfairly) that could be asked: Whether 200 images drawn from 250,000 fairly represent a sixty-year career, most of it spent on commission for clients. The reviewer did not ask it! But to remind the reviewer: A quarter of a million negatives have come into public hands, five years have been spent finding out what is in them, and the public has not yet seen the result.

That is why a Max Dupain exhibition, and that is why now. The answer was never hard to find. It only had to be looked for in the room where the question was asked.

There are obvious questions about the reviewer’s visit to the exhibition..

Did she enjoy the exhibition?

Her review reads as though she was too busy considering her ‘serious’ predetermined questions and forgot to do what you do when strolling around a  well curated and thought-through exhibition –  to take your time and enjoy great Australian photography?