ABSTRACT
Dupain was accorded a retrospective exhibition at the Australian Centre for Photography in Sydney. The curators of this exhibition, no doubt anxious to establish a genealogy for Australian art photographers working in the 1970s, had encouraged the 64-year-old Dupain to sift through his back-catalogue of negatives and to make large exhibition prints from those that, in retrospect, looked most modernist ink-on-paper photomechanical reproduction. The curators, however, were insistent, and it immediately became his signature picture. The front of the published version was signed by Dupain and dated 1940. By August 1937, Cazneaux had made an exhibition print of the scene and sent it to the London Salon of Photography under the title A Giant of the Arid North. Interestingly, in 1950, Cazneaux sent yet another version of this same image to London for an exhibition of prints by the Sydney Camera Circle, held at the Royal Photographic Society.
