Olive Cotton

Olive Cotton (11 July 191127 September 2003) was a pioneering Australian modernist female photographer of the 1930s and 1940s working in Sydney. Cotton became a national "name" with a retrospective and touring exhibition 50 years later in 1985. A book of her life and work, published by the National Library of Australia, came out in 1995. Cotton captured her childhood friend Max Dupain from the sidelines at photoshoots, e.g. "Fashion shot, Cronulla Sandhills, circa 1937" and made several portraits of him. Dupain was Cotton's first husband.
Early life.
Olive Edith Cotton was born on 11 July 1911, the eldest child in an artistic, intellectual family. Her parents, Leo and Florence (née Channon) provided a musical background along with political and social awareness. Her mother was a painter and pianist while Leo was a geologist, who took photographs on Sir Ernest Shackleton's expedition to the Antarctic in 1907. The Cotton family and their five children lived in the then bushland suburb of Hornsby in Sydney's north. An uncle, Frank Cotton was a professor of physiology and her grandfather, also Frank Cotton, was a Member of Parliament in the first Labor Caucus.
Given a Kodak No.0 Box Brownie camera at the age of 11, Cotton with the help of her father made the home 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. The photograph "She-oaks" (1928) was taken at Bungan Beach headland in this period.
Cotton attended the Methodist Ladies' College, Burwood in Sydney from 1921 to 1929, gained a scholarship and went on to complete a B.A. at the University of Sydney in 1933, majoring in English and Mathematics; she also studied music and was an accomplished pianist with a particular fondness for Chopin's Nocturnes.
Photography.
Cotton joined The Sydney Camera Circle and the Photographic Society of New South Wales, gaining instruction and encouragement from important photographers such as Harold Cazneaux.
She exhibited her first photograph, "Dusk", at the New South Wales Photographic Society's Interstate Exhibition of 1932. Her contemporaries included Damien Parer, Geoff Powell, the model Jean Lorraine and photographer Olga Sharpe, who frequented the studio.
In Australia during the 1930s clients assumed a man would be the photographer. Cotton wryly referred to herself as "the assistant". However whenever possible Cotton photographed visiting celebrities or interesting objects in the studio, even capturing Dupain working in her piece, "Fashion shot, Cronulla Sandhills, circa 1937" and made portraits of him. The publisher Sydney Ure Smith gave her many commissions, and regarded her as one of the best photographers of the 1930s and 1940s.
The Commonwealth Bank's staff magazine "Bank Notes" featured Cotton's more non-commercial photographs as illustrations.
Style.
During the 1930s Cotton developed mastery using the 'Pictorial' style of photography popular at the time and also incorporated a very modern style approach. Cotton's photography was personal in feeling with an appreciation of certain qualities of light in the surroundings. From mid-1934 until 1940 she worked as Max Dupain’s assistant in his largely commercial studio in Bond Street, Sydney, where she developed a very personal approach which concentrated on capturing the play of light on inanimate objects and in nature. She would often use her Rolleiflex camera to secure unposed reactions while Max set up the lighting for a portrait. Her style soon became distinguishable from that of other modernist photographers’ of her time.
Signature photographs.
"Tea cup ballet" (1935) was photographed in the studio after Cotton had bought some inexpensive china from Woolworth's to replace the old chipped studio crockery. In it she used a technique of back of the lighting to cast bold shadows towards the viewer to express a dance theme between the shapes of the tea cups, their saucers and their shadows. It was exhibited locally at the time and in the London Salon of Photography in 1935. It has become Cotton's signature image and was acknowledged on a stamp commemorating 150 years of photography in Australia in 1991. "Tea cup ballet" features on the cover of the book "Olive Cotton: Photographer" published by the National Library of Australia in 1995.
"Shasta Daisies" (1937) and "The Budapest String Quartet" (c. 1937) were included in the Victorian Salon of Photography exhibition of 1937.
Cotton received numerous commissions in 1945, including photographs of winter and spring flowers for Helen Blaxland's book "Flowerpieces", which also included some images by Dupain. Sydney Ure Smith was an advocate of her work, and she did many commissions for his various art publications.
Later Career.
In 1947, Cotton moved to Cowra, New South Wales, with her family and from 1959 she taught Mathematics at Cowra High School until 1964 when she opened a small photographic studio in the town, taking many portraits, wedding photographs, etc., for people in the surrounding district, where her work became well-known and much appreciated, although she was as yet unknown on the postwar city art scene until 1985.
Personal life.
In 1939 Cotton married her longtime friend Max Dupain. They separated in 1941 and were divorced in 1944.
In mid-1947 Cotton went to live in the bush 35 km from Cowra, New South Wales, with her new husband Ross McInerney. They lived in a tent for the first three years, then moving to a small farm where their two children grew up.
Death.
Cotton died on 27 September 2003, aged 92.
Legacy.
The prestigious Olive Cotton Award for Photographic Portraiture was set up in her honour and funded by Cotton's family and held at the Tweed Regional Gallery in New South Wales.
Exhibitions.
Among others, her work was shown in the following exhibitions: