Anne-Marie Willis writes broad and specific strokes about Australian uses of photography during colonization and decolonization. Willis sustains that Australian photography has to be viewed in the context of the time the image was made as well as the current historical analysis. In the strength of those two contexts, a larger, more disturbing truth can be announced about genres of landscape and portrait photography concerning Australia.
Australian colonists received much of their culture from Western Europe and in their attempts to recreate and establish an identity - advertised themselves using photographers and agencies to push images of the familiar and specifically unfamiliar. The familiar photographs represented people in front of their main street, their buildings, their order from chaos that the contrasting landscapes represented. Even in portraiture the Australian Aboriginals were misrepresented in an archaeological context, lit in studios mimicking collections for scholars. This misappropriation of photography at an institutional scale strikes me as one that speaks to the strength of propaganda and influence.
If the history of an entire nation can be confused because of the nature of its record-keeping through photography, then how are we to be convinced the images and pictures we consume are whole heartedly representative and conceived from clear minds? The legitimacy of old photographs simply because time has been applied to them gives them no more legacy than a photograph that is new and informs more to the viewer than previously. While we should appreciate and value our own histories, we should be critical of every text we read and photograph we engage in. I have seen photographs representing Aboriginals as human specimen, and it disgusts me and charms me. In what odd condition can a human be immortalized and also humiliated at the same time but in photography, art making, and writing?
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