Max Dupain: A Nation on the Sand

Michael Reid Sydney is thrilled to present A Nation on the Sand – an expansive survey of iconic images from across the six-decade career of Australia’s most famous photographer, Max Dupain AC OBE (1911–1992). Now unfolding across our entire ground-floor gallery, the exhibition coincides with Definitive Dupain, the landmark retrospective currently showing at the State Library of NSW as part of the institution’s 200th-anniversary celebrations.

Curated by Avryl Whitnall and drawn from the Library’s extraordinary archive of more than 250,000 Dupain negatives and prints, Definitive Dupain traverses a career that encompassed experimental portraiture, fashion and architectural photography, social documentary and more intimate personal work. Our complementary show distils this legacy into a focused collection of Dupain’s most celebrated, astonishing and emblematic images, offering a rare opportunity to acquire works also represented within the State Library’s nationally significant collection.

At the heart of A Nation on the Sand are the beach photographs through which Dupain helped forge an enduring image of modern Australia. Sunbaker (1937), Bondi (1939), At Newport (1952) and other defining images capture Australians at leisure, embracing the sun, sand and sea as a new national identity took shape around the freedoms and physical vitality of outdoor life. In Sunbaker – the most famous photograph ever made in Australia – body and landscape are reduced to elemental form, transforming a moment on Culburra Beach into an image now embedded in the country’s cultural consciousness.

For the first time in more than three decades, Dupain’s iconic Australian beach photographs are reunited in a single exhibition and available for acquisition. Not since a remarkable cluster of exhibitions in 1991–92 – including Helen Ennis’s landmark National Gallery of Australia survey Max Dupain: Photographs, presentations at Sydney’s Mitchell Library and Blaxland Gallery, and the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ posthumous Max Dupain: An Appreciation – have these seminal photographs been brought together in such a concentrated presentation for collectors.

For enquiries, please email saskiapugh@michaelreid.com.au