Note: Joan Blundell was one of Cazneaux’s five daughters.

Fine art photographer Matt Draper brings his creative vision to existence through unconstrained immersion, revealing life beneath the surface.

By patiently navigating through untamed environments, Draper seeks to better understand each individual species he interacts with. Working with only natural light on a series of single breaths, he manoeuvres concept to creation with minimal disturbance. Draper’s art breaks barriers between human and animal, merging realms and revealing distinct characteristics of unfamiliar physicality and hidden intuitive behaviours — resulting in a dynamic balance of vastness and intimacy.

A Matt Draper fine art print is unique and exclusive, belonging to a signature series of work. Each edition is limited in release, individually numbered, and accompanied by a certificate of authenticity. Focusing on curated exhibitions, Draper is creating notable recognition and expanding his audience, partnering with distinguished scientists and explorers to convey the importance of our natural world through art. Draper’s work is part of renowned private collections, with most editions sold before publicly viewed or displayed.

The collection of Kerry Dundas;
Private collection, Sydney

In 1972 he was appointed photographer at the Art
Gallery of New South Wales. Throughout the course of
his career hewas afforded the opportunity tophotograph
many contemporary artists from the second half of the
20th century; this vintage image of artist Brett Whiteley
shows the iconic Australian artist alongside one of his
major abstractions from the early 1960s.

Kerry Dundas, son of artist Douglas Dundas, gained an interest in photography as a student at Sydney Grammar. After leaving school he worked for various studios, including Max Dupain’s in the 1950s. In the 1960s Dundas worked in the UK as a photojournalist, drawn to subjects of social upheaval such as the Notting Hill Gate riots.

He returned to Sydney in 1967, and published a book of photographs of New Guinea subjects in 1969. In 1972 he was appointed photographer at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Throughout the course of his career he was afforded the opportunity to photograph many contemporary artists from the second half of the 20th century.

This historic photo shows the the Cahill Expressway only a handful of years after its completion in 1958. This photograph was taken before the construction of the now demolished Goldfield’s house. This landmark building would later be erected to the far right and was completed in 1966. Note also the AMP building on the far left which was finished in 1962. It is from this history of Sydney’s harbour skyline that we know this image was taken between 1962 and 1966; an intriguing glimpse into the city’s architectural past.

“Dupain’s people photographs of the 1930s and 1940s, taken on Sydney’s most popular beaches, Bondi and Manly, show Australians in the prime of their relationship with their beaches. Money was tight and the beach was free, a relaxing sense of propriety was allowing more freedom in dress and conduct, work hours were accommodating and electronic entertainment hadn’t begun to keep youth indoors. It was an environment rich with possibilities for Dupain, at ease on the beach both as an attractive athlete and a photographer nurturing an inner voice which, he wrote, would spontaneously ‘call out …. and behold, there [the picture] is’.

In a time when the outback dominated intellectual concepts of Australian identity, Dupain was photographing a beach mythology far more real to most Australians than the wide dry spaces of the inland. Few Australians lack light infused memories of a beach and long lost hours spent between cool, turbulent water and warm, quiet sand.”

Jill White, Dupain’s Beaches, Chapter & Verse, 2000, p. 74  

The photograph illustrated on the previous page Manly  [Surf Boat from Shark Tower] was taken from the top of this soaring look-out point. The Shark Tower was demolished in subsequent years.

Stamp verso reads “Max Dupain & Associates Pty Ltd, Unit 13, Valetta Building, Campbell Street, Artarmon, 2064, Australia.”

The model for this photograph was Olive Cotton, Dupain’s first wife. Ref:
Sally McInerney, Cotton’s daughter.

The David Moore estate

“David Moore was Australia’s most renowned and widely travelled documentary photographer. He began working as a photographer in 1947 in the commercial advertising studio of Russell Roberts. Between 1948 and 1951 he assisted Max Dupain, and began to develop his own approach to the documentary style, walking the streets of depressed inner-city suburbs of Sydney taking still photographs. Moore’s ‘Redfern interior’ 1949 was included in Edward Steichen’s ‘Family of Man’ exhibition, which toured internationally from 1955. Moore was one of two Australians to be included in the exhibition. In 1951 Moore turned down the offer of partnership with Dupain and moved to London to work for international picture magazines including the Observer, the New York Times, Time-Life, Look, and Sports Illustrated. From 1958 he travelled the world for the New York agency, Black Star, working for Time-Life books, National Geographic and corporate and industrial clients. His international assignments took him to Asia, America, Antarctica and Africa until the 1980s. Moore’s photographs are held in Australian and international collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, and the Smithsonian, Washington, DC.”

Excerpt taken from the Art Gallery of New South Wales website.

The David Moore estate

This exceptionally rare small proof image is one of only a few vintage prints created by David Moore before the negative was damaged. No further were made. One notes a variation in this image when compared to that which is illustrated opposite. It is taken probably within moments of the more recongisable work which does not contain the motor bike rider in the foreground.

Caption reads “Early morning traffic on the Sydney Bridge.” Another example held in AGNSW.

This image is considered to be Sievers most iconic work. Few industrial photos of this type in Australia share its hero quality.

“Sievers has written in regard to his work for Vickers Ruwolt that: ‘I carried out some of my best work in the sixties. Here I was in my element: the honesty and skill of the workers combined with the functional design of the machines stimulated me greatly and that attraction was never to leave me.’ He had found the massive gears lying on the factory floor and thought it would be good to try ‘to create a symbolic photograph of Australia’s engineering manufacturing skills to show the world outside that Australia was not merely a continent of raw materials.’ The photograph is entirely constructed and the engineer was added to give a sense of scale. Despite his abiding interest in the role of the worker in industry, people began to disappear from Sievers’s work or to be substantially reduced in scale. To some extent this reflected the increasing automation of factories but it also harks back to Sievers’s early exposure in Europe to modernism and new objectivity. Sievers was amused that ‘Gears for mining industry at Vickers Ruwolt, Burnley, Melbourne’ could be seen to relate to early modernist cinema such as the 1927 film ‘Metropolis’ but the monumental machinery beautifully posed within the dark factory and the dynamic figure of the engineer creates an image which relates more to that era than to the formalism of the 1950s and 1960s.”

Art Gallery of New South Wales Photography Collection Handbook, 2007

This image was taken from the mast of a ship on Sydney Harbour. Vaniman had intended that his panoramas be exhibited in public buildings as massive enlargements, but today they survive as extremely rare and detailed platinum contact prints. He spent over a year photographing Australia and New Zealand on behalf of the Oceanic Steamship Company creating promotional images for the company.

Beginning in 1903, Vaniman spent over a year photographing Sydney and the surrounding areas. It was during this time that he created his best known work, the panorama of Sydney, shot from a hot air balloon he had specially imported from the United States. Vaniman is best known for his images of Hawaii, Australia, and New Zealand.

The collection of the artist

This work was produced during a six month residency at the Bondi Pavilion Community Centre in 1989 and a number of works were acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales for the exhibition Twenty Australian Photographers at the National Gallery of Victoria, 1990 and a substantial number from this series were later included in a major exhibition The Beach at the Museum of Heide in 1994.

This series challenges some of the dominant representations of the beach through a series of photographic portraits taken against a painted backdrop of Bondi and explores the cultural stereotypes that usually define its visual history and parody these in an ironic and critical manner.