OLIVE COTTON
Olive Cotton was a pioneering Australian modernist photographer of the 1930s and 40s working in Sydney. She was given a Kodak No.0 Box Brownie camera at the age of 11, and Cotton and her father made the laundry into a darkroom “with the enlarger plugged into the ironing light”. Here Cotton processed film and printed her first black and white images.
While on holidays with her family at Newport Beach in 1924, Cotton met Max Dupain and they became friends, sharing a passion for photography. They married in 1939. Cotton did commercial work in the Max Dupain Studio during the war, through the 'country' years raising her family and photographing nature, to her return to public prominence in 1985 with her first solo exhibition.
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