Helen Ennis – författare

A landmark biography of a singular and important Australian photographer, Olive Cotton, by an award-winning writer - beautifully written and deeply moving.Winner of the 2022 Adelaide Festival Awards for Literature, Non Fiction AwardWinner of the 2020 Canberra Critics' Circle Award for BiographyWinner of the University of Queensland Non Fiction Book Award, Queensland Literary Awards 2020Winner of the Magarey Medal for Biography for 2020Longlisted for the 2020 Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award 2020Olive Cotton was one of Australia's pioneering modernist photographers, whose significant talent was recognised as equal to her first husband, the famous photographer Max Dupain. Together, Olive and Max were an Australian version of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera or Ray and Charles Eames, and the photographic work they produced in the 1930s and early 1940s was bold, distinctive and quintessentially Australian.But in the mid-1940s Olive divorced Max, leaving Sydney to live with her second husband, Ross McInerney, and raise their two children in a tent on a farm near Cowra - later moving to a cottage that had no running water, electricity or telephone for many years. Famously quiet, yet stubbornly determined, Olive continued her photography despite these challenges and the lack of a dark room. But away from the public eye, her work was almost forgotten until a landmark exhibition in Sydney in 1985 shot her back to fame, followed by a major retrospective at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2000, ensuring her reputation as one of the country's greatest photographers.Intriguing, moving and powerful, this is Olive's story, but it is also a compelling story of women and creativity - and about what it means for an artist to try to balance the competing demands of their art, work, marriage, children and family.'Absorbing ... illuminating and moving' Inside Story

From multi-award-winning writer Helen Ennis comes the first ever biography of the photographer Max Dupain, the most influential Australian photographer of the 20th century and creator of many iconic images that have passed into our national imagination.One of The Guardian's 25 Best Australian Books of 2024Highly Commended at the ACT Literary Awards 2025Shortlisted for the Mark & Evette Moran Nib Literary Award 2025Longlisted for the 2026 Magarey MedalMax Dupain (1911-1992) was a major cultural figure in Australia, and at the forefront of the visual arts in a career spanning more than fifty years. During this time he produced a number of images now regarded as iconically Australian. He championed modern photography and a distinctive Australian approach.To date, Dupain has been seen mostly in one-dimensional, limited and limiting terms - as exceptional, as super masculine, as an Australian hero. But this landmark biography approaches him as a complex and contradictory figure who, despite the apparent certitude of his photographic style, was filled with self-doubt and anxiety. Dupain was a Romantic and a rationalist and struggled with the intensity of his emotions and reactions. He wanted simplicity in his art and life, but found it difficult to attain. He never wanted to be ordinary.Examining the sources of his creativity - literature, art, music - alongside his approaches to masculinity, love, the body, war, and nature, Max Dupain: A Portrait reveals a driven artist, one whose relationship to his work has been described as 'ferocious' and 'painful to watch'. Photographer David Moore, a long-term friend, said he 'needed to photograph like he needed to breathe. It was part of him. It gave him his drive and force in life.''In this deeply thought book ... [Ennis'] thoughts subtly accumulate into a complex portrait of a man and a rich picture of Australia ... Revelatory.' The Conversation'This handsome biography ... a more complex man and career are revealed in lucid prose by Ennis, a leading historian of photography.' Guardian

With its moving landscapes and famously independent cultural traditions, Australia is uniquely suited to having its national narrative told through visual documentation. Helen Ennis gathers here a selection of photographs that recount the story of Australia, and through this visual chronicle she uncovers a distinctively Australian visual culture.The striking images featured in Photography and Australia, in the new ‘Exposures’ series, documents the iconic sights of the rugged Australian landscape such as the imposing Uluru, or Ayers Rock, as well as documentary photographs, wilderness shots, post-mortem studies of bushrangers and other images both quotidian and extraordinary. A leading Australian photography historian, Ennis argues that the colonial experience is a central element of these visual testaments, and embedded within this experience are the tumultuous relations between white settlers and Aboriginal peoples.Her analysis explores how the photographs reveal the racial, social and political tensions woven throughout Australian history, ranging from modern works by Aboriginal photographers to archival photographs of desolate mining towns and the peoples who eked out their living from the brutal terrain. The photographers’ personal perspectives are also embedded in the images, Photography and Australia argues, and the book examines how photographers’ responses to place, modernity and globalization were expressed through their works. Photography and Australia unearths an original and engaging perspective on Australian history, weaving a wealth of images into a compelling, informative account.