Olive Cotton

Olive Cotton (11 July 191127 September 2003) was a pioneering Australian modernist 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, Francis Cotton, was a Member of the NSW Legislative Assembly, initially as part of the first Labor Caucus, 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".

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-lighting to cast theatrical 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. which toured over 1981-2. Its catalogue Australian women photographers, 1890-1950 of 1981 was the first history of these women, and was re-released as a hardcover book in 1986 as Australian Women Photographers 1840-1960. Cotton, funded by a 1983 Australia Council grant printed decades-old negatives.

Funded in 1993 by a $10,000 writer's project grant from the Literature Board of the Australia Council, art historian Helen Ennis made contact with Cotton's daughter Sally McInerney and conducted early investigations of the photographer's career resulting in an exhibition and their jointly authored book Olive Cotton: Photographer. Ennis's efforts were welcomed by reviewer Holt as offering persuasive 'evidence of Cotton’s stylistic versatility and exploration of continuities throughout Cotton’s life and work: her love of nature, fascination with light and space, responsiveness to her chosen (and fortuitously encountered) subjects, dedication and inventiveness.' Ennis curated a retrospective exhibition of Olive Cotton's photographs at the Art Gallery of NSW in 2000, and published the definitive biography Olive Cotton: A Life in Photography, published in 2019.

Personal life In 1939, Cotton married her longtime friend Max Dupain. They separated in 1941 and were divorced in 1944.

In 2020, a River class ferry on the Sydney Ferries network was named in her honour.

Exhibitions Among others, her work was shown in the following exhibitions: 1935 London Salon of Photography, London, UK 1937 Victorian Salon of Photography 1938 Commemorative Salon of Photography exhibition held by the Photographic Society of NSW as part of the Australian 150th anniversary celebrations 1938 Group show with the Contemporary Camera Groupe at David Jones Gallery, Sydney 1945 First International Adelaide exhibition organised by the Adelaide Camera Club, Adelaide, South Australia 1946 through 1989: Exhibitions with Creative Vision, Sydney, NSW 1981 Australian Women Photographers 1890-1950 touring exhibition, curated by Jenni Mather, Christine Gillespie and Barbara Hall 1985 Olive Cotton Photographs 1924-1984 retrospective held at the Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney, touring numerous regional galleries in NSW, Victoria and Queensland throughout 1986 1992 Solo exhibition Olive Cotton, Australian Girls Own Gallery, Kingston, Canberra, ACT 1995 Women Hold Up Half The Sky, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, ACT 1995 In a Certain Light: Clarice Beckett and Olive Cotton, Ivan Dougherty Gallery, Paddington, NSW 1995 Women and Art, Mary Place Gallery, Paddington, NSW 1995 Beyond the Picket Fence: Australian Women's Art in the National Library Collections, National Library of Australia, Canberra, ACT 1996 The Reflecting Eye: Portraits of Australian Visual Artists, National Portrait Gallery, Canberra, ACT 1997 The Studio of Max Dupain, State Library of NSW 2000 Solo exhibition Olive Cotton Retrospective, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney 2002 Solo exhibition Cotton Tales an exhibition of studio family photographs taken in Cowra 2007 What's in a Face? Aspects of Portrait Photography, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney 2013 Flatlands: Photography and Everyday Space, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. 2015 The Photograph and Australia, Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney

Publications about

Collections National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney State Library of New South Wales Camping trips on Culburra Beach, N.S.W., 1937 Photographs taken for Greta Lofberg, December 1938 Cherry blossom, ca. 1946, photographed by Olive Cotton Shots of flowers, poppies, ca. 1946, photographed by Olive Cotton Interview with Olive Cotton, 19 July 1997 National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Waverley City Council Collection, Melbourne Horsham Regional Art Gallery, Victoria