Cotton captured her childhood friend Max Dupain from the sidelines at photoshoots, e.g. "Fashion shot, Cronulla Sandhills, circa 1937" and made several portraits of him.

Given a Kodak No.0 Box Brownie camera at the age of 11, Cotton with the help of her father made the home laundry into a darkroom "with the enlarger plugged into the ironing light".

While on holidays with her family at Newport Beach in 1924, Cotton met Max Dupain and they became friends, sharing a passion for photography.

at the University of Sydney in 1933, majoring in English and Mathematics; she also studied music and was an accomplished pianist with a particular fondness for Chopin's Nocturnes.

Her contemporaries included Damien Parer, Geoff Powell, the model Jean Lorraine and photographer Olga Sharpe, who frequented the studio.

[2] However whenever possible Cotton photographed visiting celebrities or interesting objects in the studio, even capturing Dupain working in her piece, "Fashion shot, Cronulla Sandhills, circa 1937" and made portraits of him.

From mid-1934 until 1940 she worked as Max Dupain’s assistant in his largely commercial studio in Bond Street, Sydney, where she developed a very personal approach which concentrated on capturing the play of light on inanimate objects and in nature.

Tea cup ballet features on the cover of the book Olive Cotton: Photographer published by the National Library of Australia in 1995.

In 1947, Cotton moved to Cowra, New South Wales, with her family and from 1959 she taught Mathematics at Cowra High School until 1964 when she opened a small photographic studio in the town, taking many portraits, wedding photographs, etc., for people in the surrounding district, where her work became well-known and much appreciated, although she was as yet unknown on the postwar city art scene until 1985.