Olive Cotton, 92, Australian photographer
Hyfler/Rosner
BYLINE: Sharon Verghis
<Sydney Morning Herald>
In a Cowra hospital on Sunday, with her husband of almost 60 years by her
side, Olive Cotton country wedding snapper, homemaker and modernist
photographer died. She was 92 and had never, close relatives say, completely
recovered from breaking her leg a few years ago. She had even been too
incapacitated to hold her beloved camera.
"There were these white irises she was waiting and waiting to photograph in
the best light, but she never got around to taking it," her sister-in-law
Haidee McInerney recalls. "She simply got too weak towards the end."
Cotton will be buried on the vast rural property, Spring Forest, which she
had shared with her second husband, Ross McInerney, for 44 years. It will be
a fitting return to the land which she had photographed for decades.
Cotton's key works, taken mostly during a creative peak between 1935 and
1939, range from the striking modernist Teacup Ballet, taken in 1935, to the
great landscapes Light and Shade and Only to Taste the Warmth, the Light,
the Wind; the stark, clean lines of Glasses, and the highly sexual portrait
of her first husband, Max Dupain, Max After Surfing.
She married Dupain in 1939, but the marriage lasted only two years. The
creative connection continued, with Cotton running Dupain's Sydney studio
during World War II before marrying McInerney and moving to Cowra.
Despite the quieter times of the recent decades, Cotton remains one of the
key pioneering figures in the development of Australian modernism in
photography, says photographer Robert McFarlane. Along with Dupain and
Harold Cazneaux, she was one of the exponents of a clean, geometric, even
stark aesthetic at the time considered radical.
The 1935 photograph Teacup Ballet, in particular, showed her innate mastery
of light and form. In creating the work, featuring a collection of cheap
department-store crockery, she somehow transmuted the banal into art,
McFarlane says. "Olive had taught trigonometry to naval aviators during the
war, and when you look at Teacup Ballet there is a mathematical precision to
it.
"She was absolutely a twin pioneer of modernism in Australia [along with
Dupain] but she was very different to Max she had a kind of humility of
vision."
The Dupain connection has remained, however, with her daughter Sally, a
writer, remaining close to Max's son, photographer Rex.
Creativity, too, has passed down the generations, with grand-daughter Lucy
Lehmann now snaring headlines for her novel The Showgirl and the Brumby,
featuring the Cowra settings so often captured by Cotton.
Cotton was rediscovered in recent years, her work featuring in a
retrospective at the Art Gallery of NSW.