Bring It to Life

The names and images of Max Dupain and Ansel Adams are among the most highly recognised—and widely recognisable—in Australian and American photography. Working on opposite sides of the Pacific, both played important roles in shaping the visual imagination of their respective nations, and in many respects have become symbols as much as individuals: Adams synonymous with Yosemite, wilderness and the American West; Dupain with beaches, sunlight and Australian modernism.

Adams's photographs of the American West are among the most reproduced images ever made, helping define a powerful and enduring vision of wilderness while contributing significantly to the conservation movement. Dupain, working primarily in Gadigal Nura/Sydney, became one of Australia's most influential photographers, his images of beaches, modern life and architecture helping articulate how Australia came to picture itself during the 20th century.

Their most celebrated photographs—images like Adams's Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite Valley, California 1960 and Dupain's Sunbaker c. 1938—have likewise achieved an iconic status, coming to represent something fundamental about each country's aspirations and sense of identity.

By the latter decades of their lives, both occupied prominent positions within the photographic cultures of their respective countries—not only through their photographs, but through their teaching, writing, advocacy and institutional influence. Adams shaped generations of photographers through his technical publications, conservation work and the workshops he conducted in Yosemite from the mid-1950s until the end of his life. Dupain, meanwhile, played a significant role in the development of photography in Australia through his writing, reviews and involvement in the photographic revival of the 1970s. Their advocacy for the status, importance and appreciation of photography was passionate, sustained and effective.

Over time, reputations, honours, iconic images and national myths accumulated around both men. It becomes difficult to remember that they were ever young, and that neither began with such grand ambitions. Looking at the photographs made during these early years, one senses something closer to excitement, curiosity and discovery: two boys with cameras, almost giddy with the possibilities of a camera, using photography to make sense of the worlds immediately around them.

Beginnings

Ansel Adams in 1903 and Max Dupain in 1911 were born into a world in which photography was itself still relatively young and in the throes of great change. When the Eastman Kodak Company released the Box Brownie in 1900, photography became an affordable, portable and genuinely popular amateur pursuit—even for children.

In Gadigal Nura/Sydney, Dupain was given a cheap cardboard Box Brownie by his uncle and later a vest-pocket camera by his great-grandmother, a gift he joked guaranteed he would fail the remainder of his school examinations.

For Adams, the two most consequential events of his life occurred almost simultaneously. In June 1916, as a bright, energetic and highly strung fourteen-year-old, he and his parents visited Yosemite for the first time. Writing about the experience more than sixty years later, the impact of this landscape—part of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and designated a National Park only twenty-six years earlier—remained palpable: ‘The splendor of Yosemite burst upon us and it was glorious ... There was light everywhere.’¹ It was during this trip he also received a Box Brownie from his father. Together, the landscape and the camera would shape the course of his life.

It feels significant that important personal relationships emerged from these years. In Yosemite, Adams met Virginia Best, whose father ran the Best Studio in Yosemite Valley. Drawn together through a love of music and hiking, they married in 1928. Both became deeply involved with the Sierra Club, the influential conservation and outdoor recreation organisation founded by John Muir, which combined Adams's passions for wilderness, community and photography. In the Sierra Club, Adams found not only camaraderie, but his first photographic audience as his images were reproduced in Sierra Club publications and brochures—helping establish his reputation while furthering the organisation's conservation goals.

In Sydney, Dupain was introduced to photography alongside his friend Olive Cotton, who he met in 1924 at Newport on Sydney’s northern beaches, where both families spent their summer holidays. As they grew older, their photographic excursions extended further afield to camping trips made with their like-minded friends—marked by companionship and discovery, and later by romance as their friendship deepened.

The early work of both, as photography became a serious pursuit, shows the influence of Pictorialism. A global movement, finding a slightly differing interpretation as it made its way from place to place in the early 20th century, it elevated the medium's status as an art form through soft focus, atmospheric effects and poetic composition—in reaction to the sometimes formulaic expression of the medium in the photographic studios of the time, and also to its appearance in the hands of amateurs and children. It was a movement deeply concerned with photography’s capacity to elicit mood, symbolism and emotional resonance. Works like Adams’s Lodgepole Pines, Lyell Fork of the Merced River, Yosemite National Park, California 1923 with its ‘luminosity: light emanating as a glow from the surface of the subjects’² and Dupain’s The flight of the spectres 1932, with its moody skies and dark sombreness, show elements—especially an interest in light and its expressive possibilities—that would remain constant throughout their careers.

By the early to mid-1930s both had embraced modernism. Again, they both found their way in the company of like-minded colleagues and friends, Adams a founding member of Group f/64 in California and Dupain, the Contemporary Camera Groupe in Sydney, both short-lived endeavours that nonetheless signalled a commitment to promoting a way of photographing that was in step with the contemporary world. They rejected imitation of painting in favour of sharp focus, formal clarity and the unique capacities of the camera itself. Yet the spiritual and emotional aspirations of Pictorialism remained embedded in the work, mixed with an upbringing flavoured by, for Adams, an American tradition of transcendentalism and in Dupain’s case, an interest in vitalism through the influence of his father. The push and pull of these elements play a significant role in giving the work of these two men a tension and complexity, elevating it above the ordinary.

Myth and Nationhood

For all the geographical distance between them, Adams and Dupain inherited worlds that were, in some respects, surprisingly similar. Both grew up in places shaped by ancient landscapes and Indigenous cultures whose histories stretched back thousands of generations. Yet Australia and the United States remained comparatively young countries, still constructing stories about themselves and their sense of themselves as nations. Photography emerged as one means through which those stories could be visualised.

In the United States, the West had become central to national mythology. Since the early 19th century, the frontier, the idea of Manifest Destiny (that assumed America’s continued westward expansion), and the promise of reinvention made possible by contact with the West shaped how Americans understood the landscape and their place in it. It was imagined as a place where individual character was forged and where new beginnings remained possible. Like the United States, Australia developed a set of colonial myths that placed particular emphasis on the vitality of contact with nature. Here the beach, outdoor life and perhaps most notably strong light increasingly became symbols of a young nation distinguishing itself from Europe. Yet there is another parallel between Adams and Dupain that extends beyond national identity. Both inherited intellectual traditions that located profound meaning in the world they inhabited.

Adams grew up in a world largely shaped by American transcendentalism. The writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, and the conservation ideology of John Muir, presented nature not simply as scenery but as a source of spiritual truth and renewal, as a place where one might encounter something larger than oneself. In keeping with this tradition, Adams’s revelatory moment at Yosemite was a personal and deeply felt one. Adams inherited a lineage that ran through transcendentalism to Walt Whitman and to the influential English philosopher Edward Carpenter, introduced to him by his Sierra Club close friend, Cedric Wright. Adams was never without his pocket edition of Carpenter’s Toward democracy 1922 as he hiked the Sierra Nevada through the mid-1920s. The book, Adams’s biographer Mary Street Alinder noted, ‘reaffirmed Ansel’s own feeling that nature was the source of all goodness and man’s best friend, nourishing life by providing beauty’.³ As the curator and writer John Szarkowski observed, Adams ‘did not photograph the landscape as a matter of social service, but as a form of private worship. It was his own soul he was trying to save'.⁴ Adams's work is informed everywhere by this transcendental legacy which was also a romantic one. For this reason, he believed that the photograph, as a vehicle of meaning, should be ‘a statement of the greatest clarity and perfection possible under the conditions of its creation and production.’⁵ His work represents the last confident and deeply felt expression of a lineage stretching from 19th-century painters such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran to the mammoth-plate photographers of the American West, including Carleton E. Watkins, Eadweard Muybridge, Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson. Through their images, wilderness was transformed into national myth.

‘A great photograph,’ Adams wrote, ‘is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed, and is, thereby, a true manifestation about what one feels about life in its entirety.’⁶ Elsewhere he insisted that photography was not simply a matter of recording what stood before the camera but of visualising an image from within; he approached photography ‘at the aesthetic and emotional levels.’⁷ His landscapes are therefore as much expressions of an inner response to the world as they are descriptions of it. Inevitably, it was one that contained within it the characteristics of a colonising project—man may be awed by nature, but it remained a resource in the service of man.

Even in his earliest work there is a tendency to suppress the anecdotal details of experience. Friends and fellow hikers quickly disappeared from the frame, while mountains, rivers and trees assumed a heightened presence. The landscapes become less records of particular journeys than attempts to express something enduring and universal. Looking at the images, it is easy to assume that these places existed exactly as we see them in the photographs. Yet many of Adams's most iconic images were made from roadsides, carparks and readily accessible lookouts. So successful had the Sierra Club’s advocacy campaigns been—alongside Standard Oil’s advertisements illustrated with photographs by Adams that urged Americans to jump in the car and ‘See Your West’—that as the century proceeded, National Parks like Yosemite were increasingly popular tourist destinations. The wilderness he depicts is a myth and a construction, yet one that continues to speak to something deeply felt and widely desired. This perhaps lies at the heart of the enduring appeal of Adams's photographs: their confidence, and their depiction of a world that appears impervious to change at a time when the world itself was becoming increasingly fragile and uncertain.

Dupain arrived at a comparable position through a different route. Like Adams, he was searching for experiences capable of lifting the individual beyond the limitations of ordinary life. Where Adams found such possibilities in wilderness, Dupain found them in sunlight, the disciplined body and, in architecture, the visualisation of which would dominate the latter part of his career—what he himself called his ‘long suit’⁸—which he regarded as reflecting one of the greatest achievements of human ingenuity.

Dupain also sought order in what he perceived to be an often overwhelmingly emotional response to the world. For, like Adams, he too was, in his own words, ‘a very sensitive creature’⁹, in childhood doted on by three generations of women and then flung out of the home into a world he found hostile and difficult. His father, George Dupain, was a pioneer of Australia's physical culture movement, promoting exercise, diet, sunlight and bodily vigour as antidotes to the pressures of modern life. Ideas associated with the vitalist movement circulated through this world.¹⁰ They emphasised instinct, energy, direct experience and a renewed relationship between the body and more natural ways of living, and as in the formation of Adams’s emerging world view, it was a philosophy shaped in a profound way by Carpenter. In this respect, Adams's transcendentalism and Dupain's vitalism can be understood as different expressions of a similar aspiration. Both sought ways of ordering experience and presenting the world clearly and coherently as a means of restoring a sense of balance, purpose and wholeness. Seen in this context, Dupain's Sunbaker c 1938 begins to look slightly different, moving beyond more familiar beach imagery. Not simply a symbol of leisure, it embodies a broader vision of health, freedom and renewal, with the body and nature merging into one. If Adams found transcendence in mountains and wilderness, Dupain often found it, like one of his heroes the author DH Lawrence—heir to Carpenter’s philosophy and favourite writer of Dupain’s mother, Ena—in the experience of light, as well as in the disciplined movement of the form in and through space. Similarly to its role in transcendental literature, light often functions as a symbol of spiritual perception, illumination and direct apprehension of truth.

A QUESTION OF STYLE

By the late 1940s, Dupain returned in earnest to architectural subjects, revisiting an early, abandoned ambition to become an architect himself—he had always, he explained, ‘a hankering for architecture’.¹¹He considered some of his finest achievements to lie in this field and went on to create widely published images of both historical and modern architecture across Australia—images that were published more than they were exhibited. If the beach and the body had once embodied vitality and renewal, modern buildings came to represent these qualities as well, combined with the capacity of human beings to impose order on the world. Dupain believed fine buildings could ‘generate sensations like visual permanence, order and stability, tranquillity, emotional security and feelings that this or that building make the world, for a me, a better place to live in’.¹² No wonder then that it became a central concern of him and his photographic studio over many years.

His collaboration with the Gropius-trained, Viennese-born Harry Seidler, beginning in 1954 soon after Seidler's arrival in Sydney, proved especially significant. Dupain admired architecture not simply as a practical achievement but as evidence of what human intelligence, discipline and imagination could accomplish. His clarity of vision and sensitivity to form aligned perfectly with Seidler's uncompromising modernism, emphasising the precision of structure and the interplay of concrete, light and shadow. The home Dupain shared with his second wife, Diana, in Castlecrag—designed in the late 1940s by Arthur Baldwinson—anchored his own life within a modernist milieu. Surrounded by the sculptural limbs of the native Angophora costata, it exemplified the union of architecture and the natural environment that he so often sought to animate with his camera.

Dupain understood photography as something more than observation, something beyond simple description. While often associated with the formal clarity and objectivity of modernism, he repeatedly emphasised the photographer's emotional and intellectual engagement with the world. ‘Sensitivity, piercing awareness, emotional and intellectual involvement, self-discipline,’ he insisted, ‘are some of the elements which create that rapport with the subject, be it a rock or a woman or a woman on a rock.’¹³ Photography became a means of intensifying experience. And perhaps, like Adams, his photographs of rocks were often more successful than his photographs of women. People are frequently awkward or treated merely as formal elements in Dupain's images; he acknowledged the unease and difficulty he experienced in the genre of portraiture.¹⁴ Increasingly, as his practice matured and he found his greatest fulfilment in photographing buildings, people are absent. In Adams's landscapes and Dupain's architectural work, figures disappear. The relationship becomes an unmediated one between the photographer—and ultimately the viewer—and the landscape or building depicted. Dupain’s fundamental aim for his work remained stable as the subject matter that held his interest shifted: ‘to seek out the inanimate and bring it to life’.¹⁵

Modernist architecture like Seidler’s offered a vision of rational order, imposing clean lines, clarity and coherence upon the rapidly changing conditions of contemporary life. This perhaps explains Dupain's lifelong pursuit of simplicity. ‘Pictorially, the simpler the form, the more impact it has on the viewer and the drama is intensified,’¹⁶ he reflected late in life. Elsewhere he described his process as a reduction of the subject ‘to elementary or even symbolic terms.’ Dupain repeatedly stripped away the incidental in search of something essential. If Adams transformed specific landscapes into meditations on wilderness and permanence, Dupain sought a comparable clarity through light, form and structure. His photographs of architecture are perhaps the clearest expression of this philosophy. Walls dissolve into planes of light. Staircases become abstract arrangements of line and geometry. Buildings are stripped of anecdote and transformed into attempts to reveal the underlying order of the world.

Looking at Dupain's photographs of Seidler's buildings, one senses something not dissimilar to Adams's response to the natural environment: a belief that form, properly understood, might reveal an underlying harmony. Their work reflects the individualism of the 20th century and its faith in the transformative power of direct experience. In both Adams's landscapes and Dupain's architectural photographs, meaning arises through an encounter between the individual and the world, unmediated. Whether standing before a mountain range or a modern building, the viewer is invited to confront something larger than themselves and, through that encounter, discover a greater sense of order, purpose and fulfilment. Beneath the photographs of both men lies a deep confidence in both human perception and humanity's ability to create meaning from experience.

Although Adams spoke of the value of coming in close and photographing detail, it is when he steps back and we are confronted with the magnificence of the view from a distance that his work becomes truly affecting, charged with emotional power. An image like Mount Williamson, Sierra Nevada, from Manzanar, California 1944, with its huge boulders dominating the foreground and light streaming across the mountain range in the distance, is primordial and mythic in its grandeur, an image of a planet seemingly unsullied by human presence, a place out of time. To stand in front of the print is to be astounded, as curator Gael Newton observed, by the ‘tonally scintillating masses defined by exquisitely delineated edges’¹⁷ achieved through his technical expertise. He explores almost to perhaps the most extreme degree, with the extremely long-focus lenses that he favoured, this notion that the camera is capable of seeing in a way that the human eye cannot. The sharpness of these images is unnerving, cosmic and unworldly in their clarity. Similarly, when Dupain photographs buildings, he exploits the inherent properties of the camera’s way of seeing, often positioning the camera low and directing it upward into the structure: creating drama and visual tension, alongside a palpable dynamism. A favoured device of modernist photography, the worm's-eye view transforms the familiar into graphically powerful studies of geometry and form, disrupting ordinary perception and encouraging us to see anew. This is displayed to remarkable effect in his photographs of Seidler's Australian Embassy in Paris, made in 1978 during the only trip he took outside the Asia-Pacific region. The building is reduced to powerful geometric shapes against the sky. It appears monumental and grounded, yet at the same time almost flung into space and out of time—architecture distilled to its most abstract, elemental and monumental form. It is little wonder that Seidler came to rely so heavily on Dupain to photograph his buildings. Their sensibilities were closely aligned; to think of a Seidler building today is often to picture not simply the building itself, but Dupain's interpretation of it.

Both remained committed to black-and-white photography throughout their careers. While each used colour in commercial assignments when required—both ran successful commercial studios their whole lives and faced the necessity of making money to support their families—neither thought highly of it nor regarded it as worthy of their artistic practice. Black and white afforded control over tone, contrast and printing, something that was difficult to achieve through colour processes at the time. Both also favoured large-format cameras capable of recording high levels of detail and tonal subtlety.

The print

The methodology Adams developed with fellow-photographer Fred Archer in the late 1930s—one they termed the Zone System—was the cornerstone of Adams’s approach to how he photographed the world. By ensuring that information was retained across the full tonal range, from the deepest blacks to the brightest highlights, Adams was able to previsualise the final image before releasing the shutter and retain unprecedented control over the printing process. His Basic photo series (1948–56), the five-volume set of books on the technical aspects of photography—became the ‘bible’ in the heyday of darkroom-era photography, found on photographers’ bookcases across the world. Increasingly, the final image emerged through a sustained act of interpretation in which exposure, development, printing and darkroom manipulation were all brought to bear upon the photograph. Most notable in this regard is perhaps the darkroom work that Adams laboured over to produce the effect he had envisaged for one of his most acclaimed images, Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1941. Just catching the fading light as it illuminated the crosses in the cemetery, Adams overexposed the negative—the final desired effect required extensive and complex darkroom manipulation.

One of Adams's most quoted observations, that ‘You don't take a photograph, you make it’, could just as easily have been Dupain's. For both men, the negative was the beginning of a sometimes-lengthy process. Dupain was less systematic than Adams, and despite protestations that technical aspects were of little interest to him, no less exacting.¹⁸ Both employed sharp focus, strong tonal contrasts and meticulous darkroom control to move beyond description towards something more symbolic. This perhaps helps explain Adams's remark that there was ‘something architectural in precise image construction.’¹⁹ It is a revealing statement. Although their mature subjects diverged, both were ultimately concerned with the same problem: how light might reveal structure and how photography might transform the apparent complexity of the world into a coherent visual order.

The practices of both men occurred against a century of profound instability. Adams and Dupain belonged to a generation shaped by economic depression, global war and the accelerating transformations of modern life. They witnessed the rise of mass culture, urbanisation, industrialisation and new technologies that altered the relationship between people and place. The post-war decades brought unprecedented prosperity but also new forms of anxiety: the threat of nuclear conflict, environmental degradation and a growing sense that the natural world was becoming increasingly fragile. The confidence visible in so many of their photographs begins to look less inevitable when viewed in this context. It is, in many ways, a search for it despite the odds.

For Adams, that search increasingly took place away from the cities, in wilderness. Yosemite, the Sierra Nevada and the great landscapes of the American West became places in which a deeper coherence might still be encountered. As he aged and his physical strength waned, Adams increasingly devoted himself to revisiting and refining earlier work, printing portfolios drawn from across his career and, in his final years, assembling the Museum Set, a carefully curated distillation of the photographs he wished to represent his achievements in major institutions. Dupain, by contrast, talked often about his desire for photography to be part of the contemporary world, that it should depict Australia's ‘way of life as it is, not as one would wish it to be’.²⁰ His photographs of Seidler's houses, made in part to present prospective clients with the promise of a modern way of life, speak directly to this vision of progress, beauty and possibility. Yet in the end both men's pursuit of perfection and order, especially as they aged, left them increasingly at odds with some of the evolving values of the late 20th century. Both were modernists. Both championed photography as a modern medium. Yet many aspects of later modernity—conceptual art, postmodern scepticism, identity politics, challenges to traditional authority, even environmental critiques that complicated wilderness narratives—sat uneasily with the values that had shaped them.

Conclusion

It is here that the late prints of Adams become particularly revealing. Looking across prints made decades apart from the same negatives, Szarkowski noticed a change that is difficult to unsee once pointed out.²¹ The shadows deepen. The contrasts intensify. The photographs become more dramatic, darker somehow. The technical means remain much the same, but the emotional register shifts. One begins to sense the distance between the young man wandering Yosemite in search of revelation and the older Adams who returned to those negatives decades later as a celebrated photographer, conservation advocate and public figure. They are the same photographs, yet they no longer seem to describe quite the same world.

The critic Robert Hughes recognised this change too when he wrote that the late prints ‘speak of anxiety’,²² suggesting that this was a man increasingly aware of his mortality. It is an arresting observation because anxiety is not something usually associated with Adams. We tend to remember the certainty of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1941, the stillness of The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming 1942 and the calm authority of Moon and Half Dome, Yosemite National Park, California 1960. A man certain of his place in the world. Yet looking closely at some of the later prints, one senses a growing awareness of vulnerability. The wilderness remains sublime, but perhaps it no longer feels entirely secure. The order that Adams spent a lifetime seeking is still present, but it appears harder won, more fragile, shadowed by an awareness of forces beyond human control. Such amazing prints—so pristine, so breathtaking in their technical mastery, and yet (and this is where the secret of their greatness may lie) strange and unsettling.

There is a push-and-pull in Dupain as well, an attempt at times to rein in his emotional excess, to somehow reconcile it with his desire for discipline. There is an austerity in the architectural photographs. His commitment to photography never diminished, nor did his fascination with the world around him. and he regarded his architectural work vital and important. Yet the work is increasingly balanced by a fascination with structure, geometry and restraint. The passion remains, but it is held in check. One senses a man searching for order no less than Adams, though he sought it not in wilderness but in the measured relationships of light and form in the built environment.

It is the tension inherent in both men—the meeting of the sensitive and emotionally vulnerable teenagers who first picked up a camera and saw the world transformed through the lens with the older artists who spent a lifetime seeking order, structure and harmony—that gives their work something that unmistakably distinguishes it from the ordinary. The photographs are animated by both impulses at once, and it is this unresolved tension that continues to give them their lasting power.

The National Gallery touring exhibition Max Dupain and Ansel Adams: in search of perfection is on display at Logan Art Gallery, Queensland from 30 Jan – 3 Apr 2027