Item #CL191-77 The Meat Queue. Max Dupain, Australian.
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The Meat Queue

1946/later printing. Silver gelatin photograph, signed and dated in pencil on image lower right, 48.7 x 60.9cm. Minor crinkles overall, chips to edges and margins not affecting image.

Illustrated in Newton, Max Dupain, 1980, p92. Held in AGNSW.

This photograph was one in a series of pictures taken by Max Dupain as commissioned by the Department of Information. Described as a documentary photograph, but not necessarily a social comment, the economic food-rationing of postwar Australia is shown in this clear modernist image. During an interview with Helen Ennis at the Art Gallery of NSW in 1991, Dupain stated “We were doing a story on queues after the war…queues for buses, vegetables, fruit. I just happened to come across this butcher shop in Pitt Street…Here they were all lined up, and I went around it, took a number of pictures, ultimately ending up with this sort of architectural approach with four of five females all dressed in black with black hats, not looking too happy about the world. Suddenly one of them breaks the queue when I’m focused up all ready to go, pure luck.”

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Item #CL191-77

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