Past exhibitions -- 2005

Blackspot: Contemporary Indigenous Photography

Switchback Gallery
Gippsland Centre for Art and Design
Monash University, Gippsland Campus
Phone: +61 3 9902 6261
Email: gippsland@artdes.monash.edu.au

Leah King-Smith 'Untitled #5 (King Billy)' 1991, from the series Patterns of Connection

Since the invention of the camera and its introduction to Australia , Aboriginal people have been the subject of its gaze. In the beginning travelers, and later Anthropologists, 'shot' and recorded images of Aboriginal people as ethnographic curios which would function as sentimental records of a dying race. Stereotypical images of dusty 'noble savages' emerged as monochromatic mementoes to European preconceptions and the European need for surveillance. Physical anthropologists, in what might be called a forensic analysis, measured and photographed individuals, and in their zeal to understand human diversity specimenised, objectified and ultimately, and somewhat ironically, dehumanized their subjects. These images survive today, as photographs of witness, some as powerful and anger-inducing as a holocaust image. Others sad and melancholic. All purported to objectivity yet none achieved it. Instead what remains are testament not to the demise of Aboriginal culture but to European colonization and dispossession. Within the confines of these 'taken' images, Aboriginal people, anonymous and silent, returned the colonial gaze.

The colonisers, however, were looking but not recognising, the returned gaze. Today we live in a visual culture. Most information is conveyed via visual media. Aboriginal people have engaged with the production of visual culture in exciting and challenging ways. Firstly through reinterpreting the captured images and the ethnographic tradition, Aboriginal photographers have not merely retuned the colonial gaze but intensified, and rejected it. Much of the work in Blackspot does not only counteract debased and stereotypical representations of Indigenous Australia, but engages with their history, imbues them with personal experience and immerses them in the complex story of Australian race relations. Thus the captured image, the freeze frame moment of history, is reinterpreted, refocused and returned. The images are frozen moments with timeless resonance.

Destiny Deacon 'Meloncholy' 2000, from the series Sad and Bad Lamda digital print from Polaroid original 115.0 cm x 143.0 cm

Within contemporary art and cultural theory there is a significant and growing body of work on how photographs represent, depict and ultimately mislead. This literature explores how images are slotted into and reinforce cultural and political agendas, and how these underpin and confirm power structures. Significantly theorists are now considering how different people regard photographs and what these mean for various groups within society. Aboriginal people have asserted that as the subject of European photographic representations they have also been the object of curiosity. This is a curiosity that involved little understanding. Aboriginal people's lives have been filled with struggle as they attempted to comprehend the uncertainty, tension and anxiety of the colonial process, while always writing against the European colonizer's imposition of identity. As the Aboriginal reconciliation movement has developed and shifted our understandings of black and white relations, Aboriginal people themselves have created images which subvert both the power-laden cultural bias of the photographic perspective and challenge the authority of the photographer.

Aboriginal people have their own tradition of photography, family photos being much valued artifacts and heirlooms. Through the work of Destiny Deacon, Fiona Foley, Leah King-Smith, Tracey Moffatt, and Christian Bumbarra Thompson, Blackspot draws on Aboriginal photographic traditions as well as interacting with the images of colonialism. These artists reject the silent and anonymous images produced by the colonisers and instead produce confronting works which refuse to be quiet. The images that follow are as compelling and affecting as they are aesthetic and creative.

Professor Lynette Russell
Director, Centre for Australian Indigenous Studies, Monash University