Olive Edith Cotton was born in 1911. Her parents, Leo and Florence (née Channon) gave her a musical background, a political awareness and a sense of social responsibility. Florence studied painting and played the piano. Leo was a geologist who learnt the elements of photography well enough that he could take photographs on Sir Ernest Shackleton’s expedition to the Antarctic in 1907. The Cotton family including five children lived in Hornsby to the north of Sydney in a native bush environment.

Given a Kodak No.0 Box Brownie camera at the age of eleven, Cotton with the help of her father, converted the laundry of their Hornsby home into a darkroom ‘with the enlarger plugged into the ironing light’. Here Cotton processed film and printed her first Black & White images. In 1924 Cotton met Max Dupain while on holidays with her family at Newport Beach, a northern beach of Sydney, NSW. She shared with Dupain a burgeoning interest in photography which was to continued throughout the rest of their lives. The photograph She-oaks, 1928 was taken at Bungan Beach headland at this time. Cotton attended the Methodist Ladies’ College, Burwood, Sydney. At about the same time she joined the Photographic Society of New South Wales gaining instruction and encouragement from photographers such as Harold Cazneaux.

Cotton exhibited her first photograph, Dusk, at the New South Wales Photographic Society’s Interstate Exhibition of 1932. Cotton frequently showed her work at exhibitions. Her photography always reflected her very considered personal observations of her surroundings with meticulous attention to the quality of light on her subjects. Cotton completed a Bachelor of Arts Degree at the University of Sydney in 1933 and instead of using her Mathematics and English majors she continued to pursue her interest in photography by joining Dupain at his new studio in Bond Street, Sydney.