Olive Cotton (11 July 1911 – 27
September 2003) was a pioneering Australian modernist female photographer of
the 1930s and 1940s working in Sydney. 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.
Self Portrait with Jean Laurraine, Photo by Olive Cotton, 1939.
She exhibited her first
photograph, "Dusk", at the New South Wales Photographic Society’s
Interstate Exhibition of 1932. She exhibited quite frequently; her photography
was personal in feeling with an appreciation of certain qualities of light in
the surroundings.
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.
