Max Dupain: Sunbakers

Abstract

Abstract When is a photograph made? At what points in its production should we locate its creative and temporal boundaries? Is it when the photographer depresses the camera shutter, submitting a chosen scene to the stasis of framed exposure? Is it when the photographer singles out this exposure for printing, thereby investing a latent image with the personal significance of selection, labour and, most crucial of all, visibility? Or is it when that image is first exposed to the public gaze, the moment when, if only by adding itself to a culture's collective visual archive, the photograph could be said to enact some sort of residual effect? These questions are of more than academic interest; already a number of exhibitions have been organized that include photographic prints never seen by those who are supposed to have ‘made’ them.1 I am thinking here of exhibitions of photographs by Russell Drysdale in Australia in 1987 and Garry Winogrand in the USA in 1988, both of which featured work made from negatives never printed during the artists' own lifetimes. So my questions immediately impinge on prevailing notions of intention, authorship, and value. But perhaps more important is the way such questions force us to consider how the making of photographs is always caught up in the complex entanglements of their own history.