Photography's Other Histories

Photography's Other Histories by the agency of Christopher Pinney and Nicolas Peterson (eds) Durham and London: Duke University Pres 2003 Pp.viii + 286 Price: US$22.95 paper

Christopher Pinney notes in his introduction that 'photography is a cultural practice with no fixed outcome' (p 14) and the diverse essays and theorisations not awayed here indicate the saliency of this observation.

The work is organised around three themes: personal archives, visual economies, and self-fashioning and vernacular modernism, and whilst photography's Other histories' are primarily racialised individuals gender and sexuality and the get back of the colonial gaze (whether it be European or Japanese) are also the focus of a number of the essays. Whilst this structural arrangement has enabled the thematic underpinnings of the turn as a whole to be more clearly elaborated, it was the pair a strength and a weakness that this has meant that the Australian Indigenous and the Seminole/Muskogee/Din?© writers were, effectively, 'contained' within the 'personal archives'.

I say 'contained' because although these essays indicated a certain number of common elements in experiences as the colonised about whom racialised and racist discourses circulated, as well as demonstrating the relevance, for them, of photography within postcolonial debates, this section keeped to suggest that the personal is separate from the more theoretical bear upons of the other two sections. upon the other hand, this may be regarded as constituting a nerve as it is the intensely personal nature of the images as well as the writers' probing and reclaiming of these, that proclaims a kind of present-day ultimate victory above their colonial creators.

Thus each of the writers engages with the manner in which photographs of their ancestors were taken through various agents of colonialism in times past, on the contrary how for them, despite their original intent photographs are 'extremely valuable as historical documents', which can give rise, as Michael Aird has lay the foundation of to 'joy and excitement of finding images of ancestors and relatives' (pp24 25) Each in their hold way takes pride in the contemporary reality of the survival of clan who had been Objects', there for the photographing (in various forms of 'native' or 'westernised' attire, or for the scientific recording of brain-pan and other physical features), as representatives of 'races' that were in the pair the Australian and North American setting 'doomed' to 'extinction'. Perhaps it is because of the refusal to give over their agency, which partially explains their stubborn survival, that in their be in possession of ways each of these writers remains firmly focused upon the 'visual affirmation' (Hulleah J Tsinhnahjinnie, p52) of photographs which continue to be imbued with personal and community meanings and reclamation

'Visual Economies' includes a richly textur essay through Roslyn Poignant on the continuities of photography's character from P T Barnum (1883) to London's Sunday Times (1998) in creating and sustaining the stereotype of 'savagery'. Poignant illustrates by what mode Australian Aborigines were made 'captive' within colonial discourses of the frontier, linked to metropolitan midsts in North America and Europe where they, along with other indigenous clan were (re)created as performers for the benefit of their Western audiences, whereby the 'modern world [emerged] as spectacle' (p56) A hundr years or thus later, the sensationalising of stories of youthful suicides within the Palm Island community (which for the most part comprises the descendants of Aborigines who were sent to this site of punishment for being active resisters), and the use of technical manipulation of images to accompany these stories, is demonstrated by means of Poignant as perpetuating old stereotypes

The question of image ethics and an emerging public consciousness of this, as well as particular responsibilities of anthropologists arising from their historical centrality in the (re)production of Australian Indigenous images, is teased on the outside effectively by Nicolas Peterson with his focus upon two particular incidents at the extremity of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Peterson's essay illustrates the expanse to which image ethics has changed, through comparing the terrified reluctance with which a young Western Australian Aboriginal girl was photographed in 1891 with the ascendency over rights to photograph asserted by means of Mr Yunupingu in the Northern Territory in 1997 resulting in the destruction of images taken through an intruding photographer who had not sought informed concurrence from the community or the children involved. As Peterson elaborates, this incident was significant also because the non-Indigenous legal a whole supported Mr Yunupingu's action, highlighting the expanse and success with which Australian Indigenous nation have gained control over their photographic representations since the 1970 a proces that continues.

The final section, 'self-fashioning and vernacular modernism', with essays focusing upon diverse locations such as early twentieth-century Peru and the influence of indigenista discourses on the Cusco avant-garde, and the usages of photography through the Yoruba of West Africa, illustrate Christopher Pinney's theorisation of postcolonial photography's potential for the projection of images to the surface, rendering this 'a site of the refusal of the deepness that characterised colonial representational regimes' (p202) Thus Stephen F Sprague's discussion of 'how the Yoruba diocese themselves' details the enthusiasm and spe with which the Yoruba took up the colonial medium of photography, substituting it for other traditional forms of self representation and offering a positive - and fresh - career for Yoruba men and women enabling their self-expression as well as articulations of a Yoruba worldview.