Max Dupain Album, 1940

Evocative photos for his friend Damien Parer

Boy! Oh Boy!

This 1937 portrait of Elizabeth Marie Cotter, inscribed ‘Boy! Oh Boy!’, is contained in an album which was a wartime Christmas present from photographer Max Dupain to his best friend, Damien Parer, who was in the Middle East.

Damien Parer (1912–1944) is probably Australia’s most famous war cinematographer. He worked in Max Dupain’s photographic studio in the late 1930s, before enlisting in January 1940. During World War II, he was a photographer and cameraman with the Commonwealth Department of Information, recording Australian campaigns in the Middle East and New Guinea.

Parer married Elizabeth Cotter in 1944 in Sydney, but he was killed six months later filming the American assault on Peleliu Island in the Pacific.

In the early 1980s this album was shown to an elderly Max Dupain, who thought it had been lost during the war. He began to cry. Max Dupain’s tears at the remembrance of his best mate were an eloquent expression of the power of photographs to trigger memory and recall the past.
Display item Max Dupain Album, 1940

 

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