‘Those of our readers who have been following overseas advertising must have noticed that commercial photography has been developing along new and imaginative lines.’
- Australasian Photo-Review in 1929, publicising the release of the book Illustrative photography in advertising
While the aesthetic and formal strategies of European modernist photography were motivated by social and political upheaval following the First World War and the Bolshevik revolution, the broader photographic community in Australia did not as readily abandon the principles of pictorialism.
It was not until Max Dupain started experimenting with, and writing about, photography that a uniquely Australian mode of modernism began to take shape.