Visual Ethnography

("Postcards from Nowhere")

Tony Hughes-d'Aeth

Department of History
The University of Western Australia
Perth
AUSTRALIA

Submitted 30 May 1999

ETHNOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHY AND JOHN LINDT

Lindt and the 'Atlas'

Today, Lindt's photographs appear troubling. They are clearly taken in a studio, and the obviously imported props merely serve to heighten this fact, to point in a faintly absurd manner to their 'studioness.' Indeed, the staged quality of these pictures is at the same time naive and sinister. They appear emblematic of a kind of 'photographic violence' (MacDougall: 107) that constitutes a metonym for a broader context of colonial violence and appropriation. For Roslyn Poignant, Lindt's photographs embody the displacement of Aboriginal people from subject to object, and the disempowerment that attended the processes of colonisation: 'Their removal from the bush to the constructed studio set . . . dressed with authentic local plants, parallels their actual displacement as the land's owners' (Poignant: 54). The conditions under which the photograph was taken speak more strongly to a contemporary viewer than the compositional and associative messages that Lindt as an amateur yet erstwhile ethnographic photographer sought to deliver. 'With their weapons laid aside and their wildness neutralized by the studio ambience, they have been transformed,' according to Poignant, 'into specimens - like the plants around them' (Poignant 54).

("Postcards from Nowhere")

I've been fortunate lately that people are responding to my "Postcards from Nowhere" series of images.  I thought the project dicey when I started, and still do, but people seem to get the irony.  I've had several unsolicited requests to purchase prints which surprises me.  I have only begun the series in earnest and can't keep up with the job of scanning what I have already shot.  It takes hours to cook up one image, and I have to try all that I shoot, for though I am "managing" the process, it is quirky and often unpredictable.  In the end, it takes me about a work week to get a couple finished images.  

But it is a happy problem.  So far. 

Reading Modern Ethnographic Photograph A Semiotic Analysis of Kalahari Bushmen Photographs by Paul Weinberg and Sian Dunn.   Author: Mlauzi, Linje M Date: 2002 Place: Durban, South Africa Published: No Type of product: MA dissertation Abstract Indigenous communities, like the Bushmen of the Southern Kalahari, always attract visitors who ‘go there’ to experience the ‘life out there’. Travelling in their Land Rovers or other 4x4s, these visitors also bring cameras and take pictures of their interactions with subject communities as evidence of ‘having been there’. For academics and journalists, these pictures are meant to illustrate their presentations of ‘what is actually there’. Both types of photographs are known as ethnographic photography. This study, therefore, asks and attempts to answer the question: how do we study ethnographic photography? As much as photographers attempt to portray their subjects realistically, their representations are often contested and criticised as entrenching subjugation, displacement and dehumanisation of indigenous peoples through ‘visual metaphors’ and other significatory regimes. This discussion (re) considers the concept of imaging others, by offering an analytical semiotic comparison between Paul Weinberg’s anchored and published photographic texts of the Bushmen, on the one hand, and Sian Dunn’s unpublished, inactive texts of the ¹Khomani Bushmen, on the other. The discussion attempts to understand documentary photographers, processes of producing of images, the contexts in which they are produced and how the communities that are represented make sense of them. Concerns with the objectivity of representation go beyond the taking and consuming pictures of other cultures. This study is, therefore, grounded in cultural, social and ideological factors that shape the production and consumption of photographic representations of other cultures.