Looking at Dupain in a fresh light  December 13, 2004
Australian photographers between the world wars helped promote
an idealised vision of a "white Australia", writes Angela
Bennie.  Perhaps the most famous and admired photograph in
Australia is Max Dupain's Sunbaker. Taken in 1937, it seems to
capture something quintessentially Australian: the muscular,
well-sculpted body, the sun, the beach, the last drops of the
sea sparkling like diamonds across his tanned, resting torso.
Even the universe seems quiescent before his beauty, merely an
indistinct nebula that surrounds him like an aureole.  The image
speaks of health and virility, of heat, of potential - and of a
certain innocence.  A new book on Australian photography between
the two world wars offers another, rather startling reading of
Dupain's imagery.  Written by the senior curator of photography
at the National Gallery of Victoria, Isobel Crombie, Body
Culture: Max Dupain, Photography and Australian Culture,
1919-1939 argues that much of Dupain's wo