Maxwell Spencer Dupain was born in Ashfield, Sydney, Australia on 4 April 1911. He was a self proclaimed ‘Taurus type’. His parents were George and Ena and they contributed French and Irish ancestry to their only child.
George Dupain (1881-1959) was dedicated to physical education, diet and health and in 1900 began one of Australia’s first fitness centres. He had an extensive library of English classics and books relating to physical characteristics, diet and well being. Max Dupain learnt to respect the fitness of mind and body from an early age.

Max Dupain was educated at Sydney Grammar School where his strengths were his sport and his love of English literature and poetry. Throughout his life he was often heard to quote Shakespeare and Blake. One of his favourite lines from Blake was ‘to see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower’. As a consequence of his rowing at school Dupain continued for many years to row a scull from Northbridge, near his Castlecrag home, for relaxation. The gift of a Box Brownie camera in 1924 made an immediate impact on Dupain’s imagination. He responded eagerly to the combination of machine, optics and the spontaneity of creation that photography provided. He commented that… ‘I latched onto photography immediately. The intrigue of producing a light picture the way we had to in the 1920’s and earlier was so fascinating that it has stayed with me all my life’. By taking many good photographs while still at school Dupain won the 1928 Carter Memorial Prize for Productive Use of Spare Time. Also while still at school he became a member of the Photographic Society of NSW where Arthur Smith was a great encourager and he met photography legend Harold Cazneaux.

Dupain’s first position of employment was that of assistant to Cecil Bostock, a leading commercial photographer in Sydney. With Bostock, Dupain was taught every detail of studio lighting, large format camera usage and Black & White films and processing. The techniques used for the early studio photographic illustrations often required painstaking attention to detail, a grounding that was invaluable to Dupain. Although initially tutored in the craft of being a Pictorialist photographer Dupain didn’t practice this picturesque and stylistic form for long. He saw that a more imaginative result could be made in the outdoors from dramatic sunlight and surprising angles. The industrial age of machines and man made constructions were subject matter made for Dupain’s minds eye. Through books such as English Modern Photography Annual and magazines such as Das Deutsche Lichtbild (German Light Pictures) Dupain absorbed the photographic revolution occurring in Europe and America and had the desire to push his own photography to greater heights of abstraction and subjective visionary.