Helen Ennis wins 2026 National Biography Award for Max Dupain: A Portrait

Sunbaker was undoubtedly Max Dupain’s most well-known {photograph}, however it was removed from his favorite.

“He felt people made too much of it,” his biographer, Helen Ennis, tells ABC Arts.

“He wished, in fact, that it didn’t dominate the discussion about him. He found that quite confining and confronting.

“But images is like that. Once a photographer has made his or her pictures, they’re free of their moorings, and the photographer does not have any declare on them any extra.

The black and white {photograph} — taken in 1937 on a day Dupain spent at Culburra Beach with pals — depicts a person’s head and shoulders as he lies within the solar.

“The composition is so monumental: that triangular shape on the sand,” Ennis says.

Ennis dedicates a chapter to Sunbaker in her ebook, Max Dupain: A Portrait, which has received the 2026 National Biography Award, value $25,000.

Also on the shortlist had been Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine, Chameleon by Robert Dessaix, Groomed by Sonia Orchard, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath by S Shakthidharan and Find Me on the Jaffa Gate: An encyclopaedia of a Palestinian household by Micaela Sahhar, which received the $5000 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work.

The judges described Ennis’s ebook as “an exceptional example of the biographer’s craft”.

“Elegantly structured and written, it weaves Dupain’s life and work into a complex whole … This biography of a major 20th-century Australian photographer will be read long into the 21st.”

A posh character

Ennis, a images curator, historian, critic and author, got here to the topic of Dupain after she revealed a biography of his first spouse, modernist photographer Olive Cotton, in 2019.

“I realised he was such a powerful presence in her story, and I needed to turn my attention to him as well,” she says.

Ennis noticed that, regardless of his profile, Dupain had grow to be a misunderstood determine.

“He’s so important in Australian culture, there’s no doubt about that, but my whole motivation was to try and humanise him rather than heroicise him.”

Dupain had been typecast as an artist, thanks partly to the affiliation of Sunbaker with concepts of Australian nationwide id and masculinity.

In her ebook, Ennis argues that the total emotional and inventive vary of the photographer’s work has been neglected “because it does not align with the heroic vocabulary of modernism and conventional ideas of masculinity”.

Moreover, she writes, the dominant view of Dupain is “of a hyper-masculine, quintessential Australian, an artist genius and anti-intellectual” — an outline which she believes fails to recognise the contradictions of his character.

In her biography, Ennis presents a extra nuanced image of the person and the artist.

“What I was trying to do was bring in a lot of other work, lesser-known work, and put it in different contexts, so that his whole milieu looked much richer and much more complex,” she says.

Ennis appears past Dupain as a person and illustrates the networks of people that supported him, together with the ladies in his life: his mom, Ena; Cotton; his second spouse, Diana; and his studio supervisor, Jill White.

She writes: “Each of these women profoundly believed in his talent and unequivocally supported his desire to be an artist, sometimes to their own detriment.”

Despite his assured veneer, Dupain’s writings reveal a person suffering from self-doubt.

“Even though his photographs are so confident, they’re so assertive, he personally struggled a lot with his emotions,” Ennis says.

Dupain was a teen when he met Cotton, who got here from a cultured background and shared his love of images.

Ennis believes Cotton’s early affect helps clarify how a boy from a household with no nice curiosity within the arts went on to grow to be “such a phenomenal presence in our art and culture”.

“In Australia, to become an artist is no easy thing,” she says.

“It’s not like he springs out of nowhere. He’s got these people who know a lot about Australian life and art. They help him in his self-formation … so that he’s able to function much more fully and realise his potential.”

The biographer’s craft

Ennis first met Dupain within the early 80s and went on to curate an exhibition of his work for the National Gallery of Australia in 1991.

While engaged on the NGA present, Ennis visited Dupain at his house.

“For me, when I’m working — this is my third biography — I really have to have a sense of the personal,” she says.

“I’m interested in that whole art life nexus, so going to his home and sitting with him in his lounge room surrounded by things he loved, that really set me up.”

Ennis recollects Dupain as “incredibly gracious” and open in his responses to her questions.

“It was only later when I realised he was actually only a few months away from death and he was being approached by so many people like me, curators and journalists and historians, and yet he gave us all this time.”

Ennis says that whereas he was well mannered and welcoming, his character was reserved. “I felt that he wasn’t someone who would be easy to know.”

As a biographer, Ennis is extra enthusiastic about exploring her topic’s artistic life than uncovering their secrets and techniques.

“Janet Malcolm, an American writer, speaks very famously about biographers riffling through the drawers in the bedroom of your subject,” she says.

“I’m OK about leaving some drawers closed. I might gesture towards some of those private things, but … I only go as far as I feel is necessary to illuminate and elucidate the work. And I never want the subject to be abject.”

The biographer by no means assumes she’s going to come to know all the pieces about her topic.

“I’m able to leave gaps,” she says.

“The reader can … make their own judgements or their own assessments: Is this someone that I would have liked as a man? Is this someone whose photographs are of interest to me? How are they relevant now?

“I do not need to have answered all the pieces. I hope that the best way I write does one thing extra dynamic with historical past and the previous.”

At house within the archives

Ennis spent five years working on the book. Unusually in a digital age, she writes and edits in longhand.

“I do not put issues on the pc until later,” she says.

“Writing in longhand permits me much more fluidity and experimentation somewhat than moving into a set place.”

She spent a great deal of time trawling through the archives at the NGA and the State Library of New South Wales, which she describes as “elementary” sources.

Ennis also carried out field work, visiting sites Dupain had photographed, and drew on oral histories.

“I had his voice in my ear numerous the time, which was actually essential,” she says.

“His humorous, sort of shy giggle, not a extremely open giggle — issues like that helped me personalise him.”

Accessing a subject’s inner life is one of the most difficult aspects of writing a biography.

“If somebody does not go away behind letters and diaries and other people aren’t ready to offer you their confidences and insights, it is actually exhausting to deliver a topic to life,” Ennis says.

“With Dupain, as a result of he gave numerous interviews in his final years, I did get a way of what he was battling … There was sufficient on the document that I feel I may create a sort of mosaic.”

Crafting a life into a narrative is another challenge.

“Making the entire life fascinating is troublesome, not simply having that trajectory the place you get numerous exercise and vitality from somebody’s youthful life after which a tailing off on the finish,” Ennis says.

“I actually wished to permit Dupain all his failings and experimentation however all his successes as effectively and it was essential to me to take care of his later work in a extremely respectful manner.”

A landmark retrospective

The win comes as a major retrospective of the photographer’s work, Definitive Dupain, is set to open the State Library of NSW on August 24.

The exhibition draws on Dupain’s enormous archive of 250,000 negatives held at the State Library of NSW.

As a fulltime photographer, Dupain produced a large volume of commercial work, about some of which he was critical.

“Later on, he mentioned he actually did not like doing the style images and superstar portraiture,” Ennis says.

“What he appreciated was one thing extra genuine. He did not need fakery. He wished an actual connection together with his material — that is why panorama was essential to him.”

His documentary photography was another source of pride.

One of his favorite works was Meat Queue, 1946, “a really fantastically constructed {photograph}” showing a line of black-clad housewives lining up in a butcher’s shop when rationing was still in place after World War II.

“[A woman] breaks into the queue and there is this little ripple of vitality,” Ennis says.

“He beloved that; he beloved the best way that probability energised the {photograph}; it animated it for him. He was at all times in search of these types of issues, the place one thing outdoors his management gave the {photograph} some vitality.”

He was also drawn to architecture photography, which he described as his “lengthy go well with”.

“That was what he wished to be recognized for, and but he hasn’t been recognized for structure as a lot as you’ll assume,” Ennis says.

“He positively wished to gesture to issues apart from Sunbaker as being essential in his profession.”

Max Dupain: A Portrait is published by Fourth Estate.

Definitive Dupain is on the State Library of NSW from August 24.