Description
Winner of the 2022 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Non Fiction Award
Winner of the 2020 Canberra Critics' Circle Award for Biography
Winner of the University of Queensland Non Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2020
Winner of the Magarey Medal for Biography for 2020
Longlisted for the 2020 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award 2020
Olive Cotton was one of Australia's pioneering modernist photographers, whose significant talent was recognised as equal to her first husband, the famous photographer Max Dupain. Together, Olive and Max were an Australian version of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera or Ray and Charles Eames, and the photographic work they produced in the 1930s and early 1940s was bold, distinctive and quintessentially Australian.
But in the mid-1940s Olive divorced Max, leaving Sydney to live with her second husband, Ross McInerney, and raise their two children in a tent on a farm near Cowra - later moving to a cottage that had no running water, electricity or telephone for many years. Famously quiet, yet stubbornly determined, Olive continued her photography despite these challenges and the lack of a dark room. But away from the public eye, her work was almost forgotten until a landmark exhibition in Sydney in 1985 shot her back to fame, followed by a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, ensuring her reputation as one of the country's greatest photographers.
Intriguing, moving and powerful, this is Olive's story, but it is also a compelling story of women and creativity - and about what it means for an artist to try to balance the competing demands of their art, work, marriage, children and family.
'Absorbing ... illuminating and moving' Inside Story
About the Author
Helen Ennis was Curator of Photography at the National Gallery of Australia (1985-92), before becoming Director of the Centre for Art History and Art Theory and Sir William Dobell Chair of Art History at ANU School of Art & Design (2014-18); she is currently Emeritus Professor. She has curated numerous exhibitions for the National Gallery of Australia, National Portrait Gallery, National Library of Australia and other cultural institutions. Her many books include Margaret Michaelis: Love, loss and photography, winner of the 2006 Victorian Premier's Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and Olive Cotton: A Portrait (2019), winner of 2022 Adelaide Festival Award for Non-fiction and the 2020 Magarey Medal for Biography. She was awarded the J. Dudley Johnson Medal by the Royal Photographic Society, London, in 2021. www.helenennis.com
Book Information
ISBN 9781460758342
Author Helen Ennis
Format Hardback
Page Count 544
Imprint HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty Ltd
Weight(grams) 765g
Dimensions(mm) 245mm * 166mm * 41mm
