'But they were never only the master's tools': The Use of Photography in De-colonial Praxis (original) (raw)
Related papers
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)
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.
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.
Anthrovision, 2020
While photography has a long history of being used by anthropologists, not much has been written of the use of anthropology by photographers. Based on my personal experiences of two distinct ethnographic fieldworks, I argue that these two practices, photography and anthropology, overlap in several ways and one can combine the skills, techniques, knowledge, insights, and objectives from the two disciplines. Throughout my master’s and PhD research I was constantly navigating back and forth between my anthropological and photography skills, which led to a blurring of the boundaries between the two. Both practices fed into each other and my anthropological work gained advantage from my photography. Specifically, anthropology can benefit from the art of photography in a way that expands and deepens meanings and ways of looking. In this article, I will provide examples of how I combined these skills and will present my argument in three steps: firstly, I will focus on mediation; how looking through the medium of a camera affects what and how we see. Secondly, following the idea of “the affective lens” developed by Brent Luvaas (2017), I will delve into how photography helped me bridge distance in the field and facilitated an easier engagement with research participants. Finally, I will spend some time explaining the state of “heightened awareness” presented by David MacDougall (2006) and will expand on it by drawing on Jean Rouch’s concept of ciné-transe (Rouch 1978). I will also refer to the concept of kinok by Dziga Vertov as a useful metaphor for understanding the relationship between the camera and the body.
Anthropology and Photography: A long history of knowledge and affect
This paper addresses the long history of photographic relationships in anthropology. It argues that the current concerns with multiple, relational and affective meanings in anthropological photographs are not simply the result of new approaches to photographic analysis, but were embedded in the relationships of the production of anthropological evidence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on examples from the British field anthropology it examines, first, the relational histories of production of those photographs, and, second, argues that those relationships have enabled the new ethnographies of photographic engagement that mark late twentieth and twenty-first century anthropological concerns. It argues that photographic ‘affect’ , as a mode of history, memory and identity becomes the focus of anthropological analysis.
From Model to Sitter: On Reclaiming Colonial Photography
Aesthetic Investigations, 2023
This paper focuses on historic anthropological photographs, meant to depict indigenous individuals as generic models of colonial stereotypes, and examines their later reclamation as portraits. Applying an intention-based account of portraiture, we discuss the historical context and contemporary examples of the utilization of these images in order to address several questions. What happens when the depicted persons in colonial imagery are treated and presented as sitters, rather than model specimens? Does this change the nature of the image? If a photograph was not originally intended as a portrait, can it come to function as such at a later stage? It is clear that, whether or not they fulfill all the requirements necessary for portraiture, these colonial photographs represent a vital resource for the reclamation of indigenous cultural heritage. As such, the paper serves as an introductory discussion into the complex issues surrounding the recategorization, repatriation, and restitution of colonial photographic archives.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND PHOTO-ELICITATION AFTER COLONIALISM
With the growing interest in colonial photography, researchers—often anthropologists and museum curators—routinely take artifacts of this work back to the site of their original production to elicit data on the content and response to the images (e.g., Day and Leizaola 2012; Geismar and Herle 2010; Young 1998). This scholarship attempts to present local and alternative knowledge of the history of colonialism recorded in the photographs. With this in mind, I approached my fieldwork in The Gambia, West Africa, expecting to gather historical narratives and subaltern commentary on the politics of the colonial past. I received nothing of the sort. Instead, I listened to extended commentaries on the appearance of the photographs—how they looked " old " ; evaluations of the people and objects depicted; guessing of the brand names of the cars and bicycles in the images; and criticisms of photographic composition. Instead of narratives, I received steadfast lists—denotations of objects rather than evocations prompted by the photographs. These comments never developed into an interest in or commentary on the colonial culture that I considered to be represented in the photographs, which caused me to question the ability of photo-elicitation to depict colonial life or to connect people to the past. Instead, photo-elicitation appears to offer us information about the aesthetic values governing the present. This essay draws on ethnographic research into the relationship between photographic aesthetics and postcolonial studies. I analyze a series of interviews