REWRITING ETHNOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHY REUSE OF ETHNOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHY BY CONTEMPORARY INDIGENOUS ARTISTS (original) (raw)
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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 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.
2021d. Hampson, J. & Weaver, R. Indigenous art in new contexts: inspiration or appropriation?
Rozwadowski, A. & Hampson, J. (eds), Visual Culture, Heritage and Identity: Using Rock Art to Reconnect Past and Present., 2021
In many countries, cultural and socio-political identity is shaped, manipulated, presented, and challenged through rock art. Both on and off the rocks, Indigenous pictographs (paintings) and petroglyphs (engravings) are powerful things in themselves, and powerful tools. Drawing from twenty years of fieldwork in southern Africa, northern Australia, and North America, this chapter focuses on re-contextualised and appropriated rock art images in commercial settings, in new art works, and as integral components of political symbols. Concepts of reproduction, agency, and affect are addressed through archaeological, anthropological, and visual heritage lenses. Specific case studies include the commodification and re-contextualisation of Kokopelli and Thunderbird motifs in the USA; First Nation images in Canada; San paintings and engravings in South Africa; and Aboriginal art in Australia.
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.
Recontextualizing Photographic Objects: Bridging Artistic and Ethnographic Research
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Photography takes on a multitude of meanings and practices among many disciplines, with this text focusing on its uses within anthropological and artistic research. The interplay between these two disciplines can expand the typical uses of photographic output, going beyond the confines of either discipline. The text looks at two case studies focused on artists, Susan Hiller and Carrie Mae Weems, and their use of pre-existing photographs in their work. They are both practicing artists who create methodologies specific to the photographs they are using. In doing so, they blur the boundaries between artistic practice and anthropological inquiry. Carrie Mae Weems’ photographic series called From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried reaches back to the very beginnings of photography. By creating new narratives with some of the earliest photographs made, she unveils some of the negative repercussions of early anthropological images and how photographs are used to construct historical identity. Hiller’s project called Dedicated to the Unknown Artists features her private collection of postcards procured in Britain over the course of many years, which she created a method of citing and organizing according to several contextualizing factors. Examining both of these series reveals a methodological approach to using pre-existing photographs informed by artistic and anthropological frameworks. Recontextualizing photographic objects brings to the foreground concerns which perhaps exist in the blind-spot of any one discipline. The photographic object is imbued with concerns from several disciplines and this text presents one means of negotiating those concerns through an interdisciplinary methodology.
ENGAGING WITH INDIGENOUS ART AESTHETICALLY
Introduction to Philosophy: Aesthetic Theory and Practice, 2021
Historically, artworks created by Indigenous peoples have been treated by Western, nonIndigenous artists and art critics as “primitive art” and belonging to ethnographic museums rather than in art galleries. This chapter traces how Indigenous arts have come to be reevaluated as arts and explores how the artforms of Indigenous peoples may be appreciated while recognising that these artforms are often created in artistic traditions quite different from those associated with the Western institution of fine arts. These traditions may not separate art from everyday life or ceremony and may involve quite different assumptions about the metaphysical nature of representation and the nature of beauty. Finally, it explores important ways to understand and appreciate the dynamic developments of Indigenous art, beyond the idea that “traditional” means without change.
Transmuting Australian Aboriginal photographs
Photographs of Australian Aboriginal people are powerful objects. Produced from the 1840s, when the camera first arrived in the continent’s nascent white settlements, such images are now invested with new meanings, becoming a rich resource for Indigenous families, history-telling and culture. The intersection of imperialism, science and popular curiosity generated a vast body of imagery of Indigenous peoples now held within the archive. This chapter assesses Australian Aboriginal photographic archives both as an instrument of past power inequalities but also asking whether such archives might nevertheless be ‘democratized’ in the present. I first trace the production and circulation of such images beginning during the nineteenth century, before turning to their more recent transformations in the hands of Aboriginal people, examining the Indigenous significance of historical photographs as revealed through research with relatives and descendants of the images’ subjects. I conclude by exploring the ways that Aboriginal photo- media artists have engaged with this rich and vast archive.
Theses: Masters, 2002
This thesis examines the reclamation of the 'Blak' body by Indigenous female photo-media artists. The discussion will begin with an examination of photographic representatiors of Indigenous people by the colonising culture and their construction of 'Aboriginality'. The thesis will look at the introduction of Aboriginal artists to the medium of photography and their chronological movement through the decades. This will begin with a documentary style approach in the 1960s to an intimate exploration of identity that came into prominence in the 1980s with an explosion of young urban photomedia artists, continuing into the 1990s and beyond. I will be examining the works of four contemporary female artists and the impetus behind their work. The three main artists whose works will be examined are Brenda L. Croft, Destiny Deacon and Rea; all of whom have dealt with issues of representation of the 'Blak female body, gender and reclamation of identity. The thesis will examine the works of these artists in relation to the history of representation by the dominant culture. Chapter 6 will look at a new emerging artist, Dianne Jones, who is looking at similar issues as the artists mentioned. This continuing critique of representation by Jones is testimony of the prevailing issues concerning Aboriginal representation.