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Accepted Paper:

Contested categories: conceptualizing an Australian Aboriginal photography in the early 21st century  
Marianne Riphagen (Australian National University, Canberra)

Paper long abstract:

Questions concerning the definition and conceptualization of art have occupied arts professionals at all times and places. Curators, critics, academics, collectors and dealers have regularly sought to characterize so-called 'queer' art, 'black British' art or 'women' art. Nevertheless, such attempts at classification remain contested and subject of debate.

In Australia, art world participants have similarly grappled with categorizing Indigenous Australian photo-media. From the 1980s onwards, when Indigenous Australian artists increasingly began working in the medium of photography, art cognoscenti have posed questions such as: what is Indigenous photography? What defines an image as Indigenous? What constitutes the category 'Aboriginal photography'?

This paper problematizes the conceptualization of Indigenous Australian photography. I will discuss recipients' changing approaches to defining and framing photographic art, while considering the vexed issue of Indigenous' ownership of cultural production. My paper argues that the amalgamation of Aboriginal and cosmopolitan experiences, concepts and influences, ever more apparent in Indigenous photographic art since the turn of the century, commands a new approach to characterizing Aboriginal photography. I suggest that to resolve recurring questions of conceptualization, we need to reconcile the nature of photographs as 'Indigenous cosmopolitan objects'.

Panel P22
The postgraduate showcase: new ideas, new talent
  Session 1