Биограф Хелен Эннис выиграла Национальную премию за книгу о фотографе Максе Дупейне

Helen Ennis wins 2026 National Biography Award for Max Dupain: A Portrait Sunbaker was undoubtedly Max Dupain's most famous photograph, but it was far from his favourite. "He felt people made too much of it," his biographer, Helen Ennis, tells ABC Arts. "He wished, in fact, that it didn't dominate the discussion about him. He found that quite confining and confronting. "But photography is like that. Once a photographer has made his or her photographs, they're freed from their moorings, and the photographer doesn't have any claim on them any more. "It's what the viewers make of them, and Sunbaker will keep resonating with different people over time. Its meaning is not fixed at all." The black and white photograph — taken in 1937 on a day Dupain spent at Culburra Beach with friends — depicts a man's head and shoulders as he lies in the sun. "The composition is so monumental: that triangular shape on the sand," Ennis says. Ennis dedicates a chapter to Sunbaker in her book, Max Dupain: A Portrait, which has won the 2026 National Biography Award, worth $25,000. Also on the shortlist were Australian Gospel by Lech Blaine, Chameleon by Robert Dessaix, Groomed by Sonia Orchard, Gather Up Your World in One Long Breath by S Shakthidharan and Find Me at the Jaffa Gate: An encyclopaedia of a Palestinian family by Micaela Sahhar, which won the $5000 Michael Crouch Award for a Debut Work. The judges described Ennis's book as "an exceptional example of the biographer's craft". "Elegantly structured and written, it weaves Dupain's life and work into a complex whole … This biography of a major 20th-century Australian photographer will be read long into the 21st." A complex character Ennis, a photography curator, historian, critic and writer, came to the subject of Dupain after she published a biography of his first wife, modernist photographer Olive Cotton, in 2019. "I realised he was such a powerful presence in her story, and I needed to turn my attention to him as well," she says. Ennis saw that, despite his profile, Dupain had become a misunderstood figure. "I felt that he'd become really one-dimensional and heroicised as a photographer," she says. "He's so important in Australian culture, there's no doubt about that, but my whole motivation was to try and humanise him rather than heroicise him." Dupain had been typecast as an artist, thanks in part to the association of Sunbaker with ideas of Australian national identity and masculinity. In her book, Ennis argues that the full emotional and artistic range of the photographer's work has been overlooked "because it does not align with the heroic vocabulary of modernism and conventional ideas of masculinity". Moreover, she writes, the dominant view of Dupain is "of a hyper-masculine, quintessential Australian, an artist genius and anti-intellectual" — a description which she believes fails to recognise the contradictions of his character. In her biography, Ennis presents a more nuanced picture of the man and the artist. "What I was trying to do was bring in a lot of other work, lesser-known work, and put it in different contexts, so that his whole milieu looked much richer and much more complex," she says. Ennis looks beyond Dupain as an individual and illustrates the networks of people who supported him, including the women in his life: his mother, Ena; Cotton; his second wife, Diana; and his studio manager, Jill White. She writes: "Each of these women profoundly believed in his talent and unequivocally supported his desire to be an artist, sometimes to their own detriment." Despite his assured veneer, Dupain's writings reveal a man plagued by self-doubt. "Even though his photographs are so confident, they're so assertive, he personally struggled a lot with his emotions," Ennis says. Dupain was a teenager when he met Cotton, who came from a cultured background and shared his love of photography. Ennis believes Cotton's early influence helps explain how a boy from a family with no great interest in the arts went on to become "such a phenomenal presence in our art and culture". "In Australia, to become an artist is no easy thing," she says. "It's not like he springs out of nowhere. He's got these people who know a lot about Australian life and art. They help him in his self-formation … so that he's able to function much more fully and realise his potential." The biographer's craft Ennis first met Dupain in the early 80s and went on to curate an exhibition of his work for the National Gallery of Australia in 1991. While working on the NGA show, Ennis visited Dupain at his home. "For me, when I'm working — this is my third biography — I really have to have a sense of the personal," she says. "I'm interested in that whole art life nexus, so going to his home and sitting with him in his lounge room surrounded by things he loved, that really set me up." Ennis recalls Dupain as "incredibly gracious" and open in his responses to her questions. "It was only later when I realised he was actually only a few months away from death and he was being approached by so many people like me, curators and journalists and historians, and yet he gave us all this time." Ennis says that while he was polite and welcoming, his character was reserved. "I felt that he wasn't someone who would be easy to know." As a biographer, Ennis is more interested in exploring her subject's creative life than uncovering their secrets. "Janet Malcolm, an American writer, speaks very famously about biographers riffling through the drawers in the bedroom of your subject," she says. "I'm OK about leaving some drawers closed. I might gesture towards some of those private things, but … I only go as far as I feel is necessary to illuminate and elucidate the work. And I never want the subject to be abject." The biographer never assumes she will come to know everything about her subject. "I'm able to leave gaps," she says. "The reader can … make their own judgements or their own assessments: Is this someone that I would have liked as a man? Is this someone whose photographs are of interest to me? How are they relevant now? "I don't want to have answered everything. I hope that the way I write does something more dynamic with history and the past." At home in the archives Ennis spent five years working on the book. Unusually in a digital age, she writes and edits in longhand. "I don't put things on the computer till later," she says. "Writing in longhand allows me a lot more fluidity and experimentation rather than getting into a fixed position." She spent a great deal of time trawling through the archives at the NGA and the State Library of New South Wales, which she describes as "fundamental" resources. "I couldn't be happier than when I'm burrowing into archives of letters and papers and photographs. It's work I absolutely adore." Ennis also carried out field work, visiting sites Dupain had photographed, and drew on oral histories. "I had his voice in my ear a lot of the time, which was really important," she says. "His funny, kind of shy laugh, not a really open laugh — things like that helped me personalise him." Accessing a subject's inner life is one of the most difficult aspects of writing a biography. "If someone doesn't leave behind letters and diaries and people aren't prepared to give you their confidences and insights, it's really hard to bring a subject to life," Ennis says. "With Dupain, because he gave a lot of interviews in his last years, I did get a sense of what he was struggling with … There was enough on the record that I think I could create a kind of mosaic." Crafting a life into a narrative is another challenge. "Making the whole life interesting is difficult, not just having that trajectory where you get a lot of activity and energy from someone's younger life and then a tailing off at the end," Ennis says. "I really wanted to allow Dupain all his failings and experimentation but all his successes as well and it was important to me to deal with his later work in a really respectful way." A landmark retrospective The win comes as a major retrospective of the photographer's work, Definitive Dupain, is set to open the State Library of NSW on August 24. The exhibition draws on Dupain's enormous archive of 250,000 negatives held at the State Library of NSW. As a fulltime photographer, Dupain produced a large volume of commercial work, about some of which he was critical. "Later on, he said he really didn't like doing the fashion photography and celebrity portraiture," Ennis says. "What he liked was something more authentic. He didn't want fakery. He wanted a real connection with his subject matter — that's why landscape was important to him." His documentary photography was another source of pride. One of his favourite works was Meat Queue, 1946, "a very beautifully constructed photograph" showing a line of black-clad housewives lining up in a butcher's shop when rationing was still in place after World War II. "[A woman] breaks into the queue and there's this little ripple of energy," Ennis says. "He loved that; he loved the way that chance energised the photograph; it animated it for him. He was always looking for those sorts of things, where something outside his control gave the photograph some energy." He was also drawn to architecture photography, which he described as his "long suit". "That was what he wanted to be known for, and yet he hasn't been known for architecture as much as you would think," Ennis says. "He definitely wanted to gesture to things other than Sunbaker as being important in his career." Max Dupain: A Portrait is published by Fourth Estate. Definitive Dupain is at the State Library of NSW from August 24.