REWRITING ETHNOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHY REUSE OF ETHNOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHY BY CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS ARTISTS (original) (raw)

Abstract

For over thirty years, artists from all over the world have recycled, reworked and repurposed visual imagery from popular and commercial cultures, both those contemporary with them, and those from past periods. The postmodern practice was known as “appropriation,” and attracted controversy from those who expected art to be original, and those who valued the temporal authenticity of imagery. Within this context, particular Indigenous artists have used this approach as a means to articulate the complexities of Indigenous identity-formation. They deliberately reuse images of their people, or of their direct ancestors, that were taken by non-Indigenous anthropologists, official recorders, or commercial photographers. Through these processes of artistic transformation, they inflect them with new connotations, above all those that attribute agency to the person or people depicted, or those that manifest the contemporary artist’s own agency. In this study, I focus on works made between 1996 and 2014 by three Indigenous Australian Artists: Brook Andrew, Vernon Ah Kee, and Daniel Boyd. I draw on concepts of Aboriginality offered by Indigenous scholars such as Marcia Langton to show how these three artists problematize the expectation that Aboriginality can be captured in fixed forms, and thus reveal the fluidity and adaptability of the concept and of its lived reality.

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