Paper short abstract:

A paper about photographic images and resistance, reciprocity and creativity by Anangu – Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people living in the far north east of South Australia

Paper long abstract:

Evaluating photographs of themselves, Anangu - Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara people living in the far north east of South Australia - follow strict, socially decided rules. There are thousands of photographs now available to them in the Ara Irititja Archival Project, a resource of digitalized images and later, born digital photographs. These images date from the early 1940s to the present. Although early purveyors of their own video making, as EVTV, being the person behind a stills camera was a rare event until the last decade.

The material for this paper is drawn from archival research with Anangu searching for suitable photographs of themselves to publish in for a book. It addresses some discoveries; firstly that the majority of archived photographs contain sets of similar visual clichés with regard to the position and framing of Aboriginal bodies that endure over decades. Secondly, that the relationship between the photographer and the person photographed is of importance in the affective quality of the image ( as Michaels pointed out years ago) and more surprisingly, to mitigate against the 'prosthetic eye' of the camera Anangu artists reciprocated by materialising their own 'panoptic' imagery.

Here, using W. J. T. Mitchell's ideas about what images might want, I review historical material, both photographic and textual, with my own fieldwork to argue that some Anangu created a quiet revolution by thinking about how to control the power of photographic images and photographers.