Title
Rock forms, South Head of Sydney Harbour
circa 1960s
Artist
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Details
- Date
- circa 1960s
- Media category
- Photograph
- Materials used
- gelatin silver photograph
- Dimensions
- 29.9 x 20.3 cm image/sheet
- Signature & date
Signed l.r. image, blue ink "Kerry Dundas". Not dated.
- Credit
- Gift of Elinor Wrobel to commemorate the permanent photography gallery at Art Gallery of New South Wales, and in memory of Fred Wrobel 2011
- Location
- Not on display
- Accession number
- 258.2011
- Copyright
- © Estate of Kerry Dundas
- Artist information
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Kerry Dundas
Works in the collection
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About
Like many other young photographers starting out in the 1940s, Kerry Dundas was drawn to the fledging ‘documentary’ aesthetic of international photography. His mature works are wide ranging in subject matter and exhibit a strong interest in the flow of everyday life and the natural environment. Dundas’s early career is marked by his association with Max Dupain with whom he worked closely in the 1950s as an assistant. He would eventually focus on photographing luminaries of the art world, particularly after his appointment as staff photographer at Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1973 (until 1988).
In the classically modernist ‘Rock forms, South Head of Sydney Harbour’ Dundas frames a composition where the natural forms have turned into an intricate pattern of lines and dots. However, the insertion of the tiny male figure at the very top of this almost decorative pictorial field gives the image an added dimension in line with the late-modernist anxiety about the increasing disjuncture between humanity and nature. Unlike Max Dupain’s and Hal Missingham’s earlier, celebratory images of Sydneysiders on the beach, this photograph is filled with drama and a sense of unease about the increasingly problematic relationship.
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Exhibition history
Shown in 1 exhibition
Kerry Dundas. photographs 1948-1988, Woolloomooloo Gallery, Australia, 02 Dec 1988–18 Dec 1988