The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights
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The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742241227 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | NewSouth |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | INDEPENDENT PUB GROUP - EPUB - EBKS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 320 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Jane Lydon is the Australian Research Council Future Fellow at the Monash Indigenous Center. She is a historical archaeologist with more than 20 years of experience, who has worked for government agencies, including the Australian Heritage Commission and the Victoria Archaeological Survey, as well as for the Museum of Sydney, as a curator-archaeologist. She is also the former coordinator of the heritage program at La Trobe University and the archaeologist formerly responsible for the Rocks in Sydney.
Read an Excerpt
The Flash of Recognition
Photography and the Emergence of Indigenous Rights
By Jane Lydon
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2012 Jane LydonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-612-3
CHAPTER 1
BEARING WITNESS
Failure to bear witness may be even more unendurable than the act of recollection.
WJT Mitchell, Picture Theory, 1994
Every Koori I know would kill for a photo of their grandmother they lost. Ask a Koori person: 'What's more important? The photos or the diamonds?'
La Perouse photographer Peter Yanada McKenzie
This book explores the role of photography in prompting recognition of Indigenous Australians and in campaigning for Indigenous rights. I want to start by considering an image I first encountered as a student, around 15 years ago, on the cover of Charles Rowley's The Destruction of Aboriginal Society. It shows two Aboriginal prisoners chained to one another by heavy metal neck-chains. They look gravely at the camera and at us. This image had a profound impact on me. It showed me, beyond any doubt, that chaining Indigenous people by the neck was a historical practice – something I hadn't known before – but it also affected me viscerally, emotionally. It aroused my pity and anger on behalf of those men.
* * *
I realised a few years ago that I was not alone in my response. Photographs of neck-chained Aboriginal prisoners have, in recent decades, become a symbol of colonial injustice, used by white and Indigenous people as shorthand for a larger history of oppression. As mainstream Australia becomes more willing to acknowledge Indigenous experience, these images are seen as graphic evidence that colonisation's impact was cruel and unequivocal. In these more recent uses the photograph of the chained Aboriginal prisoner has become a significant way of remembering the colonial past. To take just three examples: the image of the neck-chained prisoner features conspicuously in the film, The tracker, directed in 2002 by Rolf de Heer, to highlight the invincibility of the Aboriginal hero. Played by David Gulpilil, the chained prisoner ultimately escapes and defeats his captors, triumphing over colonial racism. The chains act to signify injustice and colonial oppression, thrown off at the film's climax in a kind of parable of reconciliation.
* * *
Similarly, a painted detail, based on a photograph taken in 1906 by Hermann Klaatsch, features in a large street mural at the Aborigines' Advancement League in Northcote, Melbourne. Artist Megan Evans researched and designed this mural in 1984–85, in collaboration with members of the Koori community, including Les Griggs, Ray Thomas, Millie Yarran and Ian Johnson. Alongside a range of images from across Australia's history that project Indigenous strength, here the chained prisoner has become a pan-Aboriginal symbol of injustice and identity.
* * *
My third example comes from the 2008 historical documentary, First Australians, directed by Rachel Perkins. Its fifth episode tells the story of assimilation policies in Western Australia, including the experience of men arrested for cattle-killing. As the camera moves slowly over a photo of a dozen neck-chained Aboriginal prisoners from Rottnest Island prison in Western Australia, we hear the voice of Indigenous academic Marcia Langton, narrating the scene. 'Try to imagine the thoughts of one man, in one of these chained gangs, who walked thousands of kilometres across Western Australia, to an almost certain death. It must have been an absolutely terrifying experience.'
I have since looked at these images so often that it is hard to recapture exactly my initial feelings. But I am reminded of them sometimes when I show these images to others. Some viewers react as I did – they wince, or turn their heads away. The physical blow of this picture registers clearly on their bodies, as it did on mine. So, as a historian, I found myself wondering whether these images had been used to prompt such responses in the colonial past. I assumed that they would have provoked a reaction, similar to my own, of empathy and outrage on behalf of the prisoners.
However, when I examined their historical circulation and reception I found that this was not the case. In 1905, for example, at the time of the Roth inquiry into Aboriginal conditions in Western Australia, these images were seen by mainstream settler society as evidence for safeguarding progress and for a threat contained, as chapter 2 explores. So my question then became, how and when did these images assume their present power to confront and shock us? And more broadly, how did photographs of Aboriginal people come to be seen as evidence for a shared humanity, and to be used in arguments for the better treatment of Aboriginal people? The resulting story traces the development of mainstream Australia's growing recognition of Aboriginal people as human beings, who are entitled to be treated that way.
I also pursue a number of related questions: How have photographs aroused empathy with Indigenous suffering and discrimination, and moved viewers to action on their behalf? What have been the limitations of these ways of seeing? And how have they changed over time? In our own generation, photography has come to hold a privileged place as proof of distant events – such as the death of a foreign terrorist, or the plight of victims of natural disaster. The power of the image, both to create empathy and to prove what is, has made it an essential tool in the hands of humanitarians and human rights activists attempting to intervene in distant wars or tragedies. Yet such visual strategies have drawn strong criticism for dehumanising their subjects, for effacing the abstract causes that lie behind a situation, for pretending that we all belong to a single human family, or even for inciting the violence they record.
One example of photography's dual power to elicit or to halt violence comes from Bangladesh in 1971, during the war of independence from Pakistan. Two days after the Pakistani army surrendered, Bihari prisoners were paraded before a crowd at the Dhaka race track by the Bengali Liberation Army. A group of foreign journalists were among the spectators, including Magnum photo-journalist Marc Riboud, as the soldiers began to torture their prisoners in a most horrible way. Riboud felt that this spectacle was being performed for the benefit of the foreign photographers and found himself unable to take pictures. He later said, 'I could not photograph such a scene behind the torturers, taking no risk.' He left without taking any photographs, but instead arranged an audience with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, in Delhi. In due course the photos of the event were published – on the front page of the New York Times, for example – and gained Horst Faas and Michael Laurent a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. When Riboud was ushered into Gandhi's presence he sat quietly, unable to say anything, not knowing where to start: 'I could not even tell the story of the blood or what I saw.' But Gandhi herself finally broke the silence and told him that she already knew why he was there, because she had seen the photos; she said that they shamed India before the world and she assured him that something would be done.
The pictures of torture at Dhaka were complicit in the violence – the presence of foreign photographers may even have incited the soldiers to cruelty – but they also served to reveal it to the world and so prompted intervention. This rather extreme example throws photography's ambivalent powers into sharp relief: the photographic image may prove oppression and arouse us to take action yet, at the same time, it may be profoundly complicit with injustice. As I explore further, over the twentieth century the power of images of suffering to shock has steadily increased. At the same time, however, such uses have been criticised for their ambivalent powers – seeming to numb or, conversely, entertain us as often as they move us to act.
Visibility
For most non-Indigenous Australians, ideas about Aboriginal people have always been formed through images and narratives, rather than relationships with real people. This is a function of distance – both geographic and social – as well as the minority status of Indigenous people, who make up a little over 2 per cent of the population. As Marcia Langton famously argued in 1993:
The densest relationship is not between actual people, but between white Australians and the symbols created by their predecessors. Australians do not know and relate to Aboriginal people. They relate to stories told by former colonists.
She also pointed out that 'Aboriginality' is a 'field of intersubjectivity' that is 'remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, of imagination, of representation and interpretation. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people create "Aboriginalities"'. This shared space of meaning continues to determine intercultural relations, as Indigenous Australia for the most part remains inaccessible to non-Indigenous people.
In Australia, historians of photography have tended to emphasise the medium's role in exploiting and distancing its Indigenous subjects. Quite correctly, they have shown how ideas of primitivism structured the ways that photos of Aboriginal people were circulated and viewed in Australia and around the world, particularly during the 19th century. Even before Darwinism became scientific orthodoxy, ideas that Aboriginal people were 'humanity's childhood' were prevalent, and photography often argued for their status as living remnants of Stone-Age man, doomed to give way before Western civilisation. We all know these images: neatly dressed children lined up before the mission dormitory; naked bodies posed for the camera as if they were scientific specimens. Blinded by the logic of colonisation, settlers were often unable to recognise the experience of Indigenous people recorded in visual imagery.
However, another aspect of this history has been overlooked; that is, the ways that the medium has been called upon specifically to argue on behalf of Aboriginal people to reveal Aboriginal suffering to mainstream Australia, to demonstrate Aboriginal humanity, and to urge their treatment with respect and equality. Visual evidence has much to offer historians as Australians have in recent years become increasingly prepared to examine our colonial past. By understanding past visual cultures, and the ways that photographs and other visual media were given meaning within particular historical and cultural frameworks, we may better understand how ideas about Aboriginal people, white people and the nation were disseminated among large audiences. We gain insight into the relationship between 'expert' views of Aboriginal people, such as those advanced by anthropologists, missionaries and government officials, and popular attitudes. Was reform triggered by individual humanitarians – obsessives and outsiders – as has been suggested by some historians, or was it the more complex effect of global and local cultural changes, including in the visual sphere, with the dissemination of new ideas and images? More fundamentally, was mainstream white Australian ignorance of Indigenous suffering a matter of not knowing, or not caring? Ultimately, invisibility is the easiest form of racism.
This question of the visibility, or mainstream acknowledgment of Aboriginal conditions, was framed by historian Henry Reynolds as 'why weren't we told?' – a question criticised by some as masking the more accurate formulation, 'why didn't we want to know?'. In 1968, anthropologist WEH Stanner argued that white disregard of Indigenous experience was 'a structural matter, a view from a window which has been carefully placed to exclude a whole quadrant of the landscape'. His powerful visual metaphor captured the role of interpretive frameworks in shaping what a society allows itself to see, or rather, how it understands what it sees. 'Recognition' denotes a process of comprehension that relies upon visibility, and which conflates knowledge and vision in a fashion typical of the Western tradition. Stanner's 'window' evokes the importance of recognition as a process that is profoundly visual, yet his metaphor was also literally true – even today it is hard for most Australians to see what goes on in 'remote' regions. This is one of photography's contributions to our understanding of the colonial past; despite the complex and sometimes destructive ways that photographs have been interpreted and deployed, they have also allowed urban audiences to virtually witness the treatment of Indigenous people, and enabled stories of injustice to take hold of the popular imagination.
Nonetheless, as I show in this book, recognition is never transparently beneficial for Indigenous people, and may require them to comply with impossible ideals. To be considered authentically Indigenous, they must be exotic and 'other', as signs of transformation are perceived as evidence for loss of identity. Yet by the same token, such difference is often construed as primitivism and incapacity, becoming the rationale for intervention and control. Recognition requires that Aboriginal people assume specific forms of culture and identity that are acceptable to mainstream Australian society.
Empathy and me
No 'we' should be taken for granted when the subject is looking at other people's pain.
Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003
The story of how Aboriginal people have come to be recognised by settler Australians is also relevant to international debates about the development of a visual language of human rights. For centuries, observers have noted that to feel empathy with distant suffering we must somehow be brought into proximity with its victims. By empathy I refer to the recognition of another's emotional state and, to a degree, identification with it. (Empathy overlaps considerably with sympathy, but entails a greater depth of emotional involvement. Given the endless debate about these terms, I prefer to use them broadly and more-or-less interchangeably.)
Humanitarian narratives emerged during the late 18th century as part of a culture of sentimentalism and the growing moral expectation that one should care about others. Such narratives often relied on detailed accounts of the suffering body, in an attempt to move the viewer from feeling to action. By the late 19th century, the term 'humanitarian' had come into use. Historians of human rights have shown that in many contexts humanitarians successfully deployed graphic scenes of distress as a powerful prompt to sympathy – contributing to the abolition of slavery, for example – yet the very intensity of such images often became suspect for their titillating and anaesthetising effects, serving to distance, rather than embrace, the subject.
Ultimately, some have concluded, humanitarianism itself relies upon a notion of the human that is partial, limited and exclusive. Lynn Festa, for example, argues that '[t]he subject produced by sentimental antislavery is granted only a diluted form of humanity grounded in pain and victimhood, a humanity that lasts only as long as the recognition of the metropolitan subject who bestows it', creating a divide between viewer and the imagined object of sympathy. Marcus Wood's analysis of the imagery deployed by the anti-slavery movement also concludes that slaves were represented as passive beneficiaries of white compassion, reflecting abolitionist perceptions of black men and women as human, but not equals. These scholars suggest that humanitarian narratives have acted as a potent mechanism for the distribution of power, including the power to justify when and where to intervene, and who is deserving of the 'gift' of rights.
Such limitations also reveal that despite the close historical and intellectual relationship between 'humanitarianism' and 'human rights', these are distinct and sometimes incommensurable concepts. Human rights are conceived as those rights all human beings have just by virtue of being human, while Indigenous Australians have argued for distinctive rights as the original peoples of this land, including the right to a distinct status and culture, the right to self-determination, and the right to land. While rights are often secured through an appeal to the humanitarian principle of ending unnecessary suffering, these orientations may exist in tension, as exemplified by the slave owner who campaigns for the kinder treatment of slaves or, conversely, the abolitionist who nonetheless submits to the apparatus of slavery in order to buy and free the enslaved.
Such concerns have only multiplied in an intensified global visual culture that places ever more weight upon photographic evidence for distant suffering. Photos excite empathy. Photos bring their subject closer and allow the misrecognition of ourselves in another's suffering – a form of visual recognition that is central to a concept of humanity. Yet just as with humanitarianism itself, visual narratives of suffering may act to reduce and distance the sufferer or appropriate their pain. Many argue that such identification effaces racial difference, denies agency to the sufferer or gives the viewer a feeling of benevolent largesse that never actually changes anything. For centuries, the balancing act of empathy has been viewed with suspicion for straying too far toward sensationalism, even pornography or, alternatively, for blunting sensibility and allowing us to consume suffering as spectacle ... and then put it aside. Since the 1970s in particular, critics have scornfully termed images of suffering 'victim photography', and judged them to have shored up the status quo. This hostile interpretive tradition has emphasised photography's tendency to distance its subjects, providing titillating visions of another world and its alien inhabitants.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Flash of Recognition by Jane Lydon. Copyright © 2012 Jane Lydon. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Preface
1. Bearing witness
2. Behold the tears
3. A veil of convention
4. We are eagles
5. Aboriginal Overlanders
6. Looking is deadly
7. Gather round people, let me tell you a story
8. Out of sight and out of mind?
Notes
References
Index