Photographer Battles to Stay in the Picture
The Sydney Morning Herald 10/11/2010
Steve Meacham
Rex Dupain quickly acknowledges his favourite subject in his new book and exhibition, Australia: 150 Photographs. “Turn to page 57,” he says, deadpan. “She was the most obedient model in the book. I said stay still and she did just that. I didn’t even have to get her to sign a model release.” The joke becomes clear when you reach the right page: a statue in Waverley Cemetery. But Dupain, the son of the legendary Max, has a series point. Candid, unstaged, street photography of the kind pioneered by Henri Cartier- Bresson’s “decisive moment” philosophy is under serious threat. “Litigation is enormous these days,” Dupain says. “Ninety-nine per cent of the people who appear in the book have signed a model release. In the past I’d shoot a million shots, come home. Decide what I wanted to use, then hope for the best. Now, whether I think I’m going to use the shot or not, I get [the people in the photograph] to sign a model release. We’re living in an age of censorship. Freedom is gone and buried. A lone man with a camera is not a good look.”
Things have become much worse for professional photographers since the Bill Henson furore two years ago, when police raided Roslyn Oxley’s Paddington gallery after complaints about child pornography. Dupain himself has been escorted off Bondi Beach – where his father took Sunbaker, one of the most iconic Australian photographs of all time – by over zealous police.
This year Dupain joined other photographers, including Ken Duncan, to protest against the fees councils and other organizations are charging them for taking images of such things as Bondi Beach, the Opera House and Uluru. Yet this crackdown on copyright and privacy comes at a time when any amateur with a mobile phone can ost whatever sexual indiscretion they like on Facebook without consequence. Despite the limitations, Dupain’s fifth photographic book – and his first exhibition with Tim Olsen, another son of a famous father – is packed with “real Australians” caught in some quirky landscape. One shows a young couple in a smouldering snog under the Coca Cola sign in Kings Cross, oblivious to passers-by. On the opposite page a homeless man in Woolloomooloo reads a discarded magazine on his makeshift bed surrounded by proud possessions. All three have signed model releases – as did the two hookers on page 72 (“but only when I waved $50 in front of each other them”) and the spaced-out gay guy on page 79 (“he was drunk as a skunk and collapsed as I was taking the photo”).
Bizarre juxtaposition, quirkiness and a sense of beauty in the mundane are recurring themes in Dupain’s work. Witness the photo on page 153 showing a young woman in a yellow coat standing on a pile of hay covered in white plastic and black tiles, echoing the monotones of the Friesian herd behind. Fortunately, the cows didn’t have to sign releases.
Australia: 150 Photographs by Rex Dupain, Lantern, $59.95 opens today at Tim Olsen Gallery, Jersey Road, Woollahra. The exhibition runs until November 28.