Camouflage and the Half-Hidden History of Max Dupain in War

Abstract

Max Dupain is Australia's best-known modernist photographer. The least-known period of his working life is the Second World War, when he joined many other Australian artists and served as a camouflage officer for the Department of Home Security, attached to the Royal Australian Airforce. Dupain was trained in aerial photography. He camouflaged airbases in New South Wales and photographed camouflage experiments from the air. When the war moved into the SW Pacific region, Dupain was sent to Goodenough Island in Papua to work alongside Americans. This article addresses the emotional impact of the war on Dupain and contrasts the depersonalised, abstracted aesthetics of functional aerial camouflage photography with The New Guinea Series, a portfolio of documentary photographs of people and landscapes on the islands of New Guinea and Papua. Dupain's war service left him troubled and searching for greater truth through photography. I argue that The New Guinea Series, which was completed independently of Dupain's official employment as a camoufleur, communicates his sharpened awareness of the importance of embodiment as a moral approach to the world. I propose that the New Guinea Series acted as a humanist antidote to the dehumanisation that Dupain experienced through the abstractions of aerial photography.