Photography
Cotton joined the Sydney Camera Circle and the Photographic Society of New South Wales, gaining instruction and encouragement from important photographers such as Harold Cazneaux.
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 apppreciation of certain qualities of light in the surroundings. After university she pursued photography by joining Dupain at his new studio, 24 Bond Street, Sydney. Her contemporaries included Damien Parer, Geoff Powell, the model Jean Lorraine and photographer Olga Sharpe who frequented the studio.
In Australia of the 1930s clients assumed a man would be the photographer. Cotton wryly referred to herself as "the assistant". However whenever possible Cotton photographed visiting celebrities or interesting objects in the studio, even capturing Dupain working in her piece, "Fashion shot, Cronulla Sandhills, circa 1937" and made portraits of him. The publisher Sidney Ure Smith gve her many commissions, and regarded her as one of the best photographers of the '30s and '40s.
The Commonwealth Bank's staff magazine Bank Notes featured Cotton’s more non-commercial photographs as illustrations.
Read more about this topic: Olive Cotton
Famous quotes containing the word photography:
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”
—Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)