- Convenors:
-
Richard Fraser
(Arctic University of Norway (UiT))
Peter Ian Crawford (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)
Christian Vium (Aarhus University)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
This panel explores the role of photography for understanding alternate futures. It considers the use of historical and contemporary photographs and new forms of digital sharing by actors in diverse ethnographic contexts and their collaborations with anthropologists, museums, and institutions.
Long Abstract:
We invite participants working in diverse ethnographic contexts to consider how photographs are used for imagining alternate futures. We especially welcome those working collaboratively with source communities, through institutions such as museums, and in dialogue with NGOs, political organisations, and conservation initiatives. Particularly in the digital era of social media, the Internet, and new mobile technologies, we are keen to explore how people harness, disseminate, and share photographs in new and novel ways, specifically to imagine and actualise alternate futures.
Possible sub-themes include:
- The role of photography in anthropological history and the encounter between anthropologist and host community
- Ethnographic accounts of photo return, repatriation, and digital sharing
- The use of photographs as tools during ethnographic fieldwork and photo elicitation
- The relationship between museums and host communities and the politics of representation
- Photographs as personal, transportable, and trans-historical objects
- The use of photographs to reconstruct local histories, challenge historical representations, and project alternate futures
- The role of digitisation in archival research
- Artistic and museological encounters with photo collections
- Gendered dimensions of photographic depictions and subaltern experiences
- Questions of ownership, democratisation, and decolonisation
- The ability of photographs to communicate “invisible” dimensions (e.g. sacred places, spirits, and non-human actors)
- The “political ecology” of photographs in the context of the Anthropocene.
- Digital photographs, drones, and mobile phones
- The agency of photographs and their after-lives in physical and digital forms
- Phenomenological experiences and tactile encounters with physical and digital photographs
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 March, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
As increasing numbers of descendent communities request meaningful access to photographs that represent their cultural identity through digital sharing processes, museums must also increasingly reflect on their positioning and caretaking of photographs as important objects of cultural heritage.
Paper long abstract:
Shifting from a position of the museum being the owner and controller of historical photographs within their collections, the MAA now commits to working collaboratively, to sharing knowledge about the collections in its care and to facilitating direct and indirect access to those collections. The way this is enacted is constantly evolving as new forms of digital sharing develop, but importantly, it has also prompted MAA to consider how it can decolonise and democratise its photographic collections for future imaginings. This paper explores some of the current digital sharing projects the museum is participating in, and how they are influencing the museum's methodologies.
Paper short abstract:
This paper presents an ongoing process of photoreturn and collaborative filmmaking among the Guarani-Kaiowá (Brazil) that draws from the encounter of members of the source community with a photograph collection of an indigenist organization that holds precious images of their ritual practices.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper I present an ongoing process of photoreturn and collaborative filmmaking among the Kaiowá, a Tupi-Guarani speaking people who live in central-western Brazil. Such process emerges from the encounter of members of the source community with a historical photograph collection of a catholic indigenist organization that holds precious images of ritual practices of this people. In our work, we concentrate on a set of photographs that document the community to which belong the indigenous filmmakers who have been conducting the mentioned filmmaking process. This experience has raised questions concerning the way members of the source community have seeked to re-appropriate their images; the novel ways in which they choose to share them; how photographs transit among various mediums - digital and physical - and states of (in)visibility and (i)materiality; and how they mediate relations and produce effects or, in other words, act upon the social world (human and non-human) in which they are embedded. We undertake this process assuming its experimental character and poetic quality, with the intention of illuminating the relations that the Kaiowá establish between the domains of visuality and orality, between image and word. Along this path, we have collaboratively woven an exercise in visual experimentation that has shown to create a fruitful interconnection between archival materials, narratives and life trajectories; between images and words; between Ára ymã (old space-time) and Ára pyau (new space-time), pointing to the imagination of alternative futures.
Paper short abstract:
The Living Archive of Aboriginal Art radically reimagines what archives are and do, from Indigenous perspectives. In our work, photographs-as-documentary-practice and photographs-as-high-art are inextricable from each other and integral to Indigenous sovereignty in Australia’s southeast.
Paper long abstract:
In spring 2022, we co-led an experimental course and artists’ residency at a small liberal arts college in the United States called “Decolonizing Museums.” The major outcomes were a possum-skin cloak (the first of its kind made in the U.S.) and a series of high-art photographs of project participants wearing the cloak. This project is part of an ongoing, multi-year initiative to imagine and forge a Living Archive of Aboriginal Art, based in Australia. Our objective: to radically reimagine what archives are and what they do, from the perspective of Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing.
In a collaborative paper, we use this example to make an argument that photography-as-documentary practice (artists reflexively take photographs to document every aspect of their work) and photography-as-high-art-practice (a way of insisting on Indigenous forms of knowledge-transmission and aesthetic expression) are inextricable from each other. These understandings of photography are also inextricable from cloak-making: all of the making is all part of the story. The making IS the story.
As we build the Living Archive, we’ve come to understand photographs as an invitation to be in-relation, and an urging – to all who may see them – to join in the work of amplifying Indigenous sovereignty. We emphasize matriarchal knowledge-transmission – women are leading efforts to reclaim autonomy over bodies and lands – and intercultural collaboration as a source of innovation in contemporary culture-making. Photography is simultaneously a method and a theoretical intervention, and photographs are storytelling, performance, and exchange.