Olive Cotton Research Paper

Born on July 11th, 1911 and raised in Sydney, Olive Cotton was the first born in her artistic and intellectual family. Cotton graduated from Sydney University in 1934. Her father taught her all she knew about Photography as he worked away developing black and white pictures. A few years later she married Max Dupain and worked in his studio teaching to work as an assistant. They later divorced two years after being married. Three years later she married Ross McInerney, a farmer from rural farmer from Cowra, New South Wales. In two years she had two children, where they lived in a tent on Ross’s dad’s property. She didn’t open her photography studio at Cowra until 1964, and even then she remained obscure in the larger photography world because of her rural location and her focus on commercial photography.

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The angular handles reminded Cotton of arms akimbo (a human body position in which the hands are on the hips and the elbows are bowed), which led to the idea of making a photograph to express a dance theme. Olive tried several arrangements of the cups and saucers to convey the idea, without success, until she used a spotlight and realised how important the shadows were. In order to create a theme, she used the rule of thirds to arrange the teacups in foreground, background and mid-ground. To make it natural, Cotton didn’t use symmetry in her artwork, instead she used simplicity, contrast and leading lines using shadow and light. Cotton moved the cups about until they and their shadows made a ballet-like composition and then photographed them on a cut film negative. In it she used a technique of backlighting to cast bold shadows towards the viewer to express a dance theme between the shapes of the tea cups, their saucers and their shadows. The aesthetics in the piece is beautiful and unique which creates a naturally creative