Transmuting Australian Aboriginal photographs (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Ancestral Image in the Present Tense: Researching Australian Aboriginal Photography
2015
[see link above to download copy of paper from publisher's website] When photographs in museum collections are involved in community research, our understanding of them as representations is radically altered. Drawing on archival research and fieldwork in West and South Australia, this paper presents a number of examples of the metonymic ‘presence in absence’ (Runia 2006: 6) of the past through photography that indigenous people experience when connecting with archival imagery.
Return: The Photographic Archive and Technologies of Indigenous Memory
This paper considers the intersection of Aboriginal traditions surrounding photography and the use of new technologies as both a research tool and a community resource. Over recent decades Australian cultural institutions have radically altered their management of photo- graphic archives in response to changing political and intellectual circumstances – especially Indigenous advocacy. A sense of moral obligation has become the arbiter of new cultural protocols that have moved far beyond legal provisions for protecting intellectual property. Experiments with new digital tools attempt to understand and balance the role of photo- graphs of Aboriginal people within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems. However, cultural protocols rely significantly upon representations of “remote” Aboriginal communities in northern Australia that emphasize difference and reify practices that may in fact be fluid, and overlap with Western values. In the aftermath of colonialism, photographs are important to Aboriginal communities, especially in southern Australia, not merely as an extension of tradition, but also in the context of colonial dispossession and loss. As a form of Indigenous memory the photographic archive may address the exclusions and dislocations of the recent past, recovering missing relatives and stories, and revealing a history of photographic engagement between colonial photographers and Indigenous subjects.
Australian Aboriginal Studies, 2018
In transnational settler colonial contexts, the photograph has been a tool of suppression, playing a key role in the categorisation of race and difference, as well as furthering the logic of elimination through gestures towards whiteness, authenticity and vanishing races. For Indigenous peoples living in early-invaded, densely settled areas, such as the participants in this study — Ngarrindjeri in southeastern Australia and the Shinnecock Algonquin in the northeastern United States (US) —-the problem of visual representation has long contributed to a denial of their contemporary identity and to persistent discrimination. Administrative and anthropological photography in the early twentieth century across these settler colonial polities was inextricably connected with policies of assimilation, eugen-ics and anti-miscegenation, and to the making of racial categories. Yet at the same time that official photographers were consciously filtering out the impacts of colo-nisation — imaging perennial stereotypes of the lone plains Indian on horseback in full regalia, for example, or the northern Aboriginal man poised on one leg, spear in hand — pioneering Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock women and men creatively seized upon the camera, experimenting with new technologies and media to counter these colonial imaginings. Producing rich archives in their own communities that assert visual sovereignty, their photographs narrate vital histories not known through other means. This paper arises from research with the Ngarrindjeri and Shinnecock communities to reveal the practice of two prolific Indigenous community based photographers from the mid-twentieth century: Charlotte Richards and Wickham Hunter. We explore the democratising ways in which they worked intentionally to undo colonial stereotypes and represent their people, shedding new light on Indigenous aesthetic traditions and technologies, identity, cultural continuity and belonging, and adding to recent transnational scholarship on visual sovereignty and the decolonising of the settler colonial archive. The photography of resistance heals our wounds, gives us strength…to visualise a new future. (Racette 2011:89)
The photograph as archive: Crafting contemporary Koorie culture
Journal of Material Culture, 2018
In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia, created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art/cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor wearing such adornment. In this article, I bring the necklace and the photograph into the same analytical frame, arguing for the photograph as an archive itself. I consider the trajectories through which the 19th-century image has been replicated and circulated in various productions of knowledge about Aboriginal people, and how a 21st-century artist is mobilizing it not just as a repository of visual information, but also as an impetus to creative production. She produces objects of value and is making culture anew, in a context in which Aboriginality has long/often been presumed absent, extinct or elsewhere.
THE RETURNED: MEMORY AND HISTORY IN CLASSIC AUSTRALIAN PHOTOGRAPHS
Media International Australia, 1995
An examination of a series of recent newspaper articles, each of which is about the 're-discovery' of some previously anonymous person who had featured in a classic Australian photograph. I use Benjamin, as well as recent debates within historiography around the filiation of memory from history, to discuss this phenomenon. I discuss the photograph's peculiar relationship to both memory and history. I locate the new role for the historic photograph as somewhere between the artefactual aura of the classic painting and the discursive mutability of the computer file. I claim a new role for the press which now commands and curates a large archive of images from our past and hence, like public monuments and ceremonies, has a stake in recuperating memory to serve history.