Paper short abstract:

Drawing from fieldwork with Ara Irititja, an Indigenous digital archiving project in central Australia, this paper considers how the properties of digital images change our ideas about photography. I also suggest the metaphor of photographs as a currency: objects circulated as media of exchange.

Paper long abstract:

The proliferation of images online raises interesting questions about what photographs are, why they are particularly powerful kinds of things, and how digital media are reconfiguring not only what we know, but also how we know. Anthropologists are increasingly interested in what Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (2003) call "photography's other histories," ethnographically-informed accounts of locally-appropriated photographies that unsettle linear histories of photography privileging the West. There's also emergent engagement with the terminology and assumptions of "the digital age," and "the digital divide," as scholars urge close attention to how the digital works in specific cultural contexts.

In this paper, I build on these literatures and draw from fieldwork with an Indigenous digital archive serving remote communities in central Australia to think through photographs as a unique kind of currency of social life: simultaneously objects with particular materialities and media of exchange. My argument is twofold. First, I assert that the infrastructures through which photographs are viewed (in this case, as images on screen, records in a database), and the pathways through which they circulate (in this case, accessed in small social groups, often segregated by gender, and shared via an online intranet, but not available on the worldwide web) are crucial components in contemporary cultural production. Secondly, I suggest that this project offers a fresh perspective on markets in cultural heritage and economies of knowledge, urging reconsideration of our presumptions of both "public" and "private," and the levels of translation and limits of digitization in our 21st century lives.