Resolution

Performativity

For contemporary Indigenous artists, photography can serve a range of performative functions. It can document events and culture for the historical record or for future generations, just as it can be part of a performative process that seeks to articulate indigeneity. The processes of taking, printing and finishing a photograph can also be performative, reminding us that a photograph is partial and subjective. Historically, photography has been used by authorities in Australia—governments, anthropologists, scientists and historians—to categorise and manage our Indigenous population, presenting a pantomime of Indigenous identity rather than any lived reality of what is to be an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander.

By taking up the camera themselves, unearthing family and community histories in the photographic archive, recording culture and ceremony and enacting roles of their own devising, Indigenous artists today are reasserting their Indigenous identity and correcting the historical record. This formidable movement toward self-determination through photography and performativity over the past thirty years will no doubt empower future generations to confront the stereotypes and one-dimensional characterisations seen not just in today's media but also in the photographic archives.

Performativity is expressed in the work of:

• Nici Cumpston
• Ali Gumillya Baker
• Darren Siwes
• Christian Thompson
• Damien Shen

Materiality

The adoption by photomedia artists of techniques and interventions that focus our attention on the objectness of the photograph is a major trend in contemporary practice. While this speaks to a nostalgia for materiality, for the handmade, in an increasingly digital and virtual world, it also reflects a concern with keeping alive the history of photography. Its use mitigates photography's inherent technical sameness, personalising the photographic print and imbuing it with an intimacy, warmth and fallibility not often associated with traditional photographic printing processes.

The attendant use of early photographic processes by Indigenous photographers, with its referent points back to a time when photography was often used as a colonising and controlling tool, is also particularly resonant with meaning. Photographs that forge a direct connection between the experiences of the photographer and the viewer, in this way, result in a relationship that is palpable, engaging us both intellectually and emotionally.

Materiality is expressed in the work of:

• Nicole Foreshew
• Brenda L. Croft
• Brook Andrew
• James Tylor

Connection

Sociability has always been part of the photographic experience. Photographs can bring people together—a family album, a loved one's portrait or a photograph of a place that has a shared meaning for a community. This social experience also extends to the act of taking a photograph, which can be thought of as an exchange between the photographer and his or her subject. The proliferation and digitisation of photography has democratised this aspect of photographic culture, as it has become much easier to share experiences and keep connected with family and community, and to express these connections.

Historically, the Indigenous experience of photography was very different. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were photographed in the nineteenth century in ways that stripped them of their identity—nameless and without cultural context. Indigenous artists today are drawn to photography's tremendous capacity to build and maintain connections between people and places, and they do so through collaborative projects with communities or by challenging photography's historical role in colonisation.

Connection is expressed in the work of:

• Danie Mellor
• Megan Cope
• Robert Fielding
• Michael Aird
• Ricky Maynard