| Cruickshank is more serious this time, certainly more confronting, and this gives cause to re-examine his premise, founded in Lindt's original photographs. During the century since Lindt and his generation of colonial photographers gathered their images of indigenous peoples, within Australia and throughout the world, a remarkable transition has occurred. Cruickshank's Archive marks this: the observer has become the observed, the target of interpretation. With the exception of a handful of
anthropology students and museum ethnographers, the modern consumers of these photographs generally overlook their informational, evidentiary content in favour of the nature of the problematic relationship between the photographer/coloniser and the subject/colonised. And this relationship itself has undergone tremendous revision during the past two decades. Ten or twenty years ago, frontier or ethnographic
photography was interpreted in a straightforward fashion as offering direct insight into the disparity in power relations between colonisers and colonised. In these
interpretations the faux studio constructions assembled by Lindt, with their artefact props and painted landscape backdrops, could be said to 'form part of a narrative whereby
European colonial authority portrayed itself as having the power to erase Indigenous space' [Hayes: 26]. A wave of recent interpretation has challenged that power of erasure. The 1996 Colonial Post Colonial exhibition [Museum of Modern Art at Heide, Victoria] and the 1997 Portraits of Oceania exhibition [Art Gallery of New South Wales] offer two recent examples. The thorough-going reassessment of ethnographic photography undertaken in both exhibition catalogues is one positive benefit of an otherwise amorphous phenomenon - 'post colonialism'. As elusive as post-modernism itself, this phase of history, in Stanhope's words, now encourages 'both marginalised and prevailing populations to speak of what has been kept silent in Imperial accounts' [Stanhope: 36]. Accordingly, the ethnographic subjects of photographic studies by Lindt, Edward Curtis, Charles Kerry, Alfred Burton, Paul Foelsche are now shaking off their passivity. Their stance has been misinterpreted: perhaps it is resistance, rather than enslavement to the time-delayed rigour of the collodion wet-plate process, which holds them still and glowering under Lindt's studio lights. Certainly this is the unequivocal interpretation of most contemporary historians of ethnographic photography, white and black. As Brenda Croft writes, the gaze of the indigenous subject neither varies nor wavers: this 'same gaze, the same stance, the same resistance is echoed in images of Indigenous people from every place and of every time. The collective pain, anger, resignation, tired patience, sense of loss and displacement is echoed in contemporary 'shots' of angry, urban Indigenous people and people of colour in their determination to keep resisting' [Croft: 13-14]. Cruickshank's re-editing of Australian photographic imagery must be regarded against the ebb and flow of this historiography. If, on the one hand, his transpositions occur solely to remind us of the unequal power relations on the Australian frontier, by imagining how we might feel as the object of Lindt's manipulative photography, then he stands corrected. For as Croft and others confidently maintain, the Aboriginal subjects of these photographs had that well in hand. To remove or edit their confronting gaze is to obliterate that resistance. If, on the other hand, the ethnographic frontier is judged to be a more complex zone, in which neither Aborigines nor colonists stared each other down with a uniform gaze, Cruickshank has dealt another card into the pack. We can imagine, afresh, what the frontier might have been like, and reconstruct the forces which drew these representatives of the Bundgalung and Gumbainggir groups into Lindt's Grafton studio. | MUSEUM OF THE COLONIAL POST COLONIAL 1. JW Lindt Grafton, NSW, c.1875 Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW Dixson Galleries, PXA 432-2 #11 2. JW Lindt Grafton, NSW, c.1875 Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW Dixson Galleries, PXA 432-2 #4 3. JW Lindt Grafton, NSW, c.1875 Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW Dixson Galleries, PXA 432-2 #7 4. JW Lindt Grafton, NSW, c.1875 Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW Dixson galleries, PXA 432-2 #12 5. JW Lindt Grafton, NSW, c.1875 Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW Dixson Galleries, PXA 432-2 #5 6. JW Lindt Grafton, NSW, c.1875 Mitchell Library, State Library of NSW Dixson Galleries, PXA 432-3 #3 MUSEUM OF THE COLONIAL POST COLONIAL Each unique digital cibachrome 140cmx100 cm 1997 |