2

DIVERSITY, EMPOWERMENT
AND SOCIAL JUSTICE

2.0 CHAPTER INTRODUCTION

Moritz Neumüller
In the program for the conference cycle Restitutions. Photography in Debt to Its Past, celebrated
in spring of 2022 in Barcelona, curator and photography historian Carles Guerra claims that
“restituting, repairing, repatriating, and renaming are part of the new functions of photography,
which faces a debt to its past and itself ”. As an example, he mentions that a new wall label

has been recently added to the renowned photograph by Dorothea Lange, Migrant
Mother, Nipomo, California, taken in March of 1936, [which] reveals a paradigmatic
shift in the humanist tradition that has sustained the history of photography. . . . The
new label includes technical information revealing how the photograph by Dorothea
Lange has participated both in the evidencing of injustice and in the generation of new
forms of injustice throughout history. From 1979, the year Florence Owens Thomp-
son demanded to be credited as the subject depicted in the image, the photograph has
become the most notorious and fertile case study.
(Guerra 2022)

The famous image, already mentioned in the introduction to this book, is indeed a “fertile case
study”, not only because of the history of the person depicted and her claims for money and
recognition but also because of how and why the picture was made and how it was used.
The label Guerra refers to seems to be the one we can fnd on the MoMA website (2022):

Migrant Mother depicts an impoverished farmworker and her children at a pea-pickers’

camp in California. Lange created this iconic photograph by emulating well-known
Christian iconography of Mary and the infant Jesus in an attempt to compel 1930s
viewers to extend religious compassion to rural families experiencing famine. The
Farm Security Administration commissioned photographs like this one to promote
New Deal social programs aiding those aficted by the Dust Bowl. Historians have
recently observed that images of white sufering were more likely to garner support and
receive wide circulation than images of Black families in similar poses and conditions.

DOI: 10.4324/9781003219279-3 87
 Moritz Neumüller

Sally Stein has recently delivered another chapter of her in-depth research on this image and its
author (2021). The making of this picture alone is worth a closer look. In an interview given
some 25 years afterwards, Lange recalled only a quick succession of “fve exposures, working
closer and closer from the same direction” (1960: 126). But it seems that Lange was simplifying
here, as it turns out she exposed more than fve negatives during this brief stop. Not long after
her death, a sixth negative was found by her widowed husband and added to the Lange archive
at the Oakland Museum. Two decades ago, “while poring over materials in that archive”, Stein
unfolded an unremarkable piece of yellowed paper to discover a seventh negative, “but did not
consider this any kind of discovery worth publicizing because the exposure was so . . . goofy”
(Stein 2021: 69). Nonetheless, the seventh exposure made it into two canonical publications
in 2018 (Meister 2018; Pardo and Golbach 2018). Stein not only proposes a new order for the
shots (strangely, not even this simple technical question seems straightforward enough to have
two experts agree on it) but also draws an interesting conclusion from the “goofy” mishap:

While Florence Owens pretty much retained her guarded pose with wary eyes and a
poker face, one of her kids was more openly suspicious or just perplexed by this stranger
moving toward them with a camera while probably also making suggestions for altered
poses and arrangements. For a moment, the second-to-youngest daughter, Katherine
(later Mclntosh) sabotaged Lange with her eyes squinting and her mouth making a
grimace while seeming to chew apprehensively on her lower lip. Most of us who take
pictures have pulled in comparable gafes. . . . But given the composure that sufuses
so much of Lange’s oeuvre, I never before thought of her being obliged to tangle
with chance. Now that this image leads me to do so, I am more awed by her aesthetic
achievement while also appreciating it better as a difcult, labored (and edited) efect.
(Stein 2021: 69)

But let’s return to MoMA’s new gallery label and the question of “white sufering”. In my
opinion, the new explanation, probably a result of a revision in the context of the #BLM move-
ment, still falls short. While it is true what is said about “images of Black families in similar poses
and conditions”, the same can be claimed about other parts of the US population that could
not provide whiteness as a “requisite for the categories connected to purity, virginity, and good
motherhood”, as Richman has put it (2018).
Stein mentions these other migrant mothers (Figure 2.1) when she speaks of “countless
other short-term candidates for secular ‘Madonna’ status which was one staple or fallback motif
of Depression photographers”. However, her main interest is in focusing on “those elements of
the picture that have imbued this Depression image with lasting power”, as she rightfully refuses
“the essentially tautological argument one encounters in too many studies of Lange and Migrant
Mother that this most famous Lange picture is ipso facto great chiefy because it has been so widely
reproduced” (Stein 2021: 13). In any case, Thomson’s Cherokee heritage (Stein 2021: 51–58)
and these other non-white migrant mother options have not made it into the MoMA caption.
In many ways, Photography’s Other Histories, published in 2003 but rooted in an international
conference held at the Museum of Queensland in Brisbane in late 1997, shows that the process of
re-writing of the medium’s history in this direction started already some decades ago. In the intro-
duction text, co-editor Christopher Pinney speaks of the need to reframe photography and “pre-
sent a radically diferent account as a globally disseminated and locally appropriated medium”.

Much recent writing that seeks to historically contextualize photography’s emergence

during a period of colonial expansion has drawn on crucial insights from Edward Said

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Figure 2.1 Migrant mothers of the FSA. Credit: Farm Security Administration – Ofce of War Informa-
tion Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division Washing-
ton. (a) Russell Lee, Young Indian Mother and Baby, blueberry camp, near Little Fork, Minnesota,
1937. (b) Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother. Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven
children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California, retouched, 1936. (c) Dorothea Lange, Mexican
Mother in California. “Sometimes I tell my children that I would like to go to Mexico, but
they tell me ‘We don’t want to go, we belong here.’” (Note on Mexican labor situation in
repatriation), by Dorothea Lange, 1935. (d) Russell Lee, Mother and Child, FSA (Farm Secu-
rity Administration) clients, former sharecroppers, just before moving to Southeast Missouri
Farms, 1938 (cropped from a horizontal image and slightly retouched for this publication).

and Michel Foucault and has tended to construct photographic imagery and practice
as immovably within a “truth” that simplistically refects a set of cultural and political
dispositions held by the makers of those images.
(Pinney and Peterson 2003: 2)

He also warns of “eloquent but untested” hypotheses, such as that of Algerian poet Malek Alloula
in The Colonial Harem (1987), who spoke of photography as “the fertiliser of the colonial vision [pro-
ducing] stereotypes in the manner of great seabirds producing guano” (Pinney and Peterson 2003:

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2–3). Following Ginzburg (1989: 35), Pinney argues that these “physiognomic readings against
preexisting political hypotheses” fall short because “an image can do a particular kind of work in one
episteme yet perform radically diferent work in another”. For him, it “appears inappropriate to pro-
pose infexible links between formal qualities and efect”, which is why he calls for “a more nuanced
reading of the afnities between particular discursive formations and the image worlds that parallel
them, as well as sophisticated analyses of their transformational potentialities” (Pinney and Peterson
2003: 3). To transcend the inevitable limitations of this sort of formal analysis, Pinney recommends
looking closely and comparing, which is what one of the contributors, James Faris, thoughtfully
does, in this case, at the diference between a published and an unpublished image that Edward S.
Curtis took of a Navaho woman, “probably in the summer 1903” (Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2 a Edward Curtis (1903/4), two portraits of a Navaho woman in the Library of Congress Col-
lections. (a) Head-and-shoulders portrait of Navaho woman, facing front (b&w flm copy
neg.), LC-USZ62–103498. (b) A Navaho Smile (b&w flm copy neg.), LC-USZ62–46943.

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 Chapter Introduction

Figure 2.2 b Continued

The frst, a head-and-shoulders portrait, Navaho Woman, is a “dour, posed photograph of a

woman: . . . bejeweled, straight-faced, sad, stoic, certainly inscrutable, and perhaps ‘vanishing’.
The jewelry was the property of Curtis” (Faris 2003: 94). The second, A Navaho Smile, is

a lovely image of the same woman [that] could not show greater contrast. Indeed, her
entire face changes, and years disappear. If this smile refects Curtis’s relationship with
his models, then he got on very well. Here there is no jewelry, no dark backdrop, no
contrived pose. This grand photograph was never published.
(2003: 94)

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The detail of the jewellery that Curtis provided to make the photograph more “authentic”,
as a representation of a female Indigenous type reminds us of other “fakes” and “stagings” by the
same photographer, probably a year later. In one of them, he shows Charlie Day, a young white
male, as a God Impersonator for a healing practice: “Curtis’s masked Navajo were often phony –
they were actually photographs of a European-American trader’s son in Navajo gear!” (Faris
2003: 91). This kind of cultural appropriation, sometimes with harmless and playful intentions,
others with manipulative purposes, carelessness, or simply as a quick fx while producing a pho-
tographic record, is not an isolated phenomenon. The case of the Italian-Bolivian photographer
Luigi Domenico Gismondi, mentioned in Chapter 2.6, is one of them: In a masquerade that
implies a certain indiference for cultural diference, Gismondi dresses up his own son as an young
Indigenous girl (sic!), to accompany another Andean type in a studio portrait.
An even more dazzling carnivalesque disguise game was played for the scientifc expedition
that the Japanese undertook in the Chinese province of Manchuria, in 1933–34.
The background for this colonial enterprise, as so often, was linked to economic interests in
early capitalism (Williams 1944). The South Manchuria Railway Company (SMR) was estab-
lished in 1906, with half of the original capital of the company being provided by the Japanese
government (Low 2003: 100–103), and the next few decades saw a period of intense railroad
rivalry between China, Russia and Japan, in which economic and territorial rights were at stake
(Wei 1980). The SMR provided Japan with the means by which to exploit Manchuria’s natural
resources, and “science” was instrumentalized for this purpose. In this sense, The First Scientifc
Expedition was a belated attempt by the Japanese colonizers to perform “feldwork and data
collection” in China.

The militaristic tone of the expedition, escorted as it was by some thirty soldiers, along
with its much-trumpeted successful conclusion, were further proof of Japan’s ability to
match European colonial powers and to exert its superiority over the people of other
Asian countries (Young 1966). . . . The expedition mapped out the new space of the
Japanese empire, as it progressed through the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1933.
The portable space carved out by the expedition, and by the camera, was marked by
the Japanese fag, a symbol that allegedly struck fear into the hearts of the “natives.”
It was not only the fag, however, that symbolized the Japanese presence. Dressed in
traveling garb not unlike that of British explorers, and accompanied by armed troops,
the expedition members evoked associations with European explorers in nineteenth-
century Africa.
(Low 2003: 105–117)

The expedition not only appropriated the forms and narratives of exploration created by
Europeans but also emulated its “style”. This time, the “gear” consisted of khaki-coloured pith
helmets and colonial uniforms (Low 2003: 109).
The strategy of harnessing science to the cart of oppression is well known. Foucault was
convinced that the functioning of photography has been entangled in a complex of industry
and ideology and that this element of control is already present in 19th century, when pho-
tographs were used as instruments of administrative and disciplinary authority. For John Tagg,
too, photography can never be freed from the institutional background in which it is immersed,
and police, prison and hospital archives have been flled with images to identify, to exemplify
and to typify (1993: 20). However, these types and stereotypes existed already before the ofcial
birth of photography. Gottfried Schadow’s National-Physiognomieen (1835), for example, was an
artists’ guide from “outlines of portraits of savage tribes” (Poignant 2003: 68). These techniques

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of draftsmanship contributed to 19th-century “realism” but also supplied a legible code for the
popular representations of the Indigenous Other. Roslyn Poignant underlines the relationship
between fxity of form and fxity of ideas, which is refected in the dual meaning of the words
“stereotype” and “cliché” (both initially terms for repetitive printing processes). She also relates
the industrialization of printing (using the stereotype process as a method of replication) to the
traveling circus as an industrialized form of mass entertainment (which lived on stereotypes
about the unknown and obscure) in the 19th century (69).

Pamphlets and posters used to announce the travelling circus, but the ephemeral
nature of these newsprint sources and circus literature, has made it easy to overlook
them: the cumulative power of these textual and graphic representations to fx the
savage stereotype.
(Poignant 2003: 74)

All this comes together in Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s ground-breaking Civil Contract of Pho-
tography. Carles Guerra mentions her at the very beginning of his introduction text for the
conference cycle in Barcelona. Azoulay contradicts Barthes’s photographic notion of “it was
there” and centres our attention on the fact that the photographed people were there, and in
fact haven’t stopped being there: “they are still present there at the time I’m watching them”
(Azoulay 2008: 16).

The theory of photography proposed in this book is founded on a new ontological-

political understanding of photography. It takes into account all the participants
in photographic acts: camera, photographer, photographed subject, and specta-
tor approaching the photograph (and its meaning) as an unintentional efect of the
encounter between all of these. None of these have the capacity to seal of this efect
and determine its sole meaning.
(Azoulay 2008: 23)

Azoulay’s new “theory of photography” is thus fundamental, in the most literal sense, for the
discussions, essays and case studies of the following chapter about diversity, empowerment and
social justice, especially her contestation to the “right” of photographers to own their images in
a moral, or even legal, sense.

It is commonly accepted and legally established that the photographer owns the images
that he or she makes – that the photographer’s ownership of the image is his or her
“right” under the doctrine of property rights. It is this putative “right” of ownership
that, in the case of photographs, I want to contest here. . . . Most importantly, I would
like to challenge the transformation of the photograph into an object of private property.
(Azoulay 2008: 98)

She describes the photographic situation as an encounter in which at least two people gather
around the camera and take part in the ritual of photography. In that encounter, one is holding
a camera, while the other, knowingly or not, becomes the photographed person. The photo-
graphed persons, she claims, are treated as if they have renounced in advance any legal right to
their own image, entrusting it to the hands of others (98–99). Collaborative and participative
practices in photography, such as described by Michelle Bogre (Chapter 2.3) and discussed by
Anthony Luvera, Julian Germain, Tifany Fairey and Mark Strandquist (Chapter 2.5) take these

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notions of empowerment and agency very seriously. A more intuitive approach can be seen in
the work (and life) of the young photographer Joel Orozco (Figure 2.3).
Born in Los Angeles California, but raised in Chihuahua, this “autodidact who burst into the
world of photography by buying a camera at a fea market in Mexico” obtained a scholarship to

Figure 2.3 Joel Orozco, Untitled, from the series Sonrisas (Smiles), 2021.

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 Chapter Introduction

study photography at the California Institute of the Arts. After his graduation in 2017 he had a
promising start into a photographic career, with a few exhibitions and articles, but it all changed
when he fell into a deep personal crisis that involved alcohol and drugs and ended up living on the
streets of Los Angeles for several months. With a hand help of his family, friends and professional
mentoring, Joel is now back on track and wants to build his own artistic practice. The “meth-
odology” he employs is still self-taught and direct, but it shows a deep respect for and empathic
connection with the people he photographs, as shown in his series Smiles. Maybe this body of
work does not go as far as sharing authorship in the photographic event, yet it shows an “inverted
gaze” when compared to the traditional examples of white photographers looking at the how the
other half lives. Himself both a benefciary and a victim of the American Dream, Orozco allows
his photographic vis-à-vis to show themselves as dignifed and proud human beings.
Zheng Andong’s self-portrait as a Chinese Cowboy, featured in Yining He’s essay “The Rail-
way and Its Images” (Chapter 2.1), also picks up on some of the issues at stake. This image is
based on the photograph Indian Viewing Railroad from top of Palisades. 435 Miles from Sacra-
mento, a stereoscopic images taken by Alfred A. Hart (Figure 2.4). While subtly echoing the
historical photograph, Zheng’s image also comments on “the relationship between the people
who lived on the land, the owners of the land and the people who built the railway upon it.
These complex issues frame the current discussion of decolonizing landscape in the U.S. con-
text”, as Yining He puts it.
Another East-West connection via a historic photograph is represented by an image taken
in 1879 by John K. Hillers (Smithsonian Institution neg. 2251-D-2). It has been described
by Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie as an innocent enough photograph of the Zuni mission school,
showing a Zuni woman standing behind the children “in a very maternal, protective way”
(2003:46–49).

The woman is We’wha, a respected member of the community, involved in the cer-
emonies, an excellent artist and cultural ambassador for her people. . . . This beautiful

Figure 2.4 Alfred Hart, Indian Viewing Railroad From Top of Palisades. 435 miles from Sacramento, 1865.
Photographic print on stereo card: stereograph, albumen.
Source: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.

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 Moritz Neumüller

woman was a man. We’wha was born into this world a male, lived her life as a woman,
and then departed this world as a man (1896). This photograph is a perfect example
of those complexities that cannot be reduced to a three-sentence caption. . . . The
anthropologist would label We’wha berdache whereas contemporary Native gay and
lesbians prefer the self-described title of two-spirited society.
(Tsinhnahjinnie 2003: 46)

In her contribution (Chapter 2.2), Nina Tonga describes the somehow similar self-defnition
of the Fa‘afafne, people who identify themselves as having a third gender or non-binary role in
Samoa and the Samoan diaspora. The work of Yuki Kihara, an interdisciplinary artist of Japanese
and Samoan descent, often plays with this fuidity of genders, as well as with colonial images
that portray Polynesian people as sexual objects.
The already mentioned contribution by Michelle Bogre, “Participatory Photography: Gaze,
Representation and Agency”, claims that “Participatory photography may be the genre of the 21st
century” and gives an excellent overview of contemporary practices (Chapter 2.3). The Beyond
Magnum panel led by Anthony Luvera digs deeper into some of these issues and raises the question
“Who’s Looking at Whom?” (Chapter 2.5). Embedded in this context is a case study on a collabo-
rative photography course for sighted and visually impaired participants in Canterbury, UK, using
inclusive andragogical methods, that is, methods of teaching adult students. As the co-authors,
Simon Hayhoe, Partho Bhowmick, Noemi Peña Sánchez and Karl Bentley, moreover show, partic-
ipants successfully learnt with and from each other, produced images collaboratively and remained
connected afterwards no matter their level of education or previous experiences of photography.
The last two chapters take us to Australia and Peru and illustrate these considerations and
thoughts with concrete artistic positions. “The Breath of Memory” (Chapter 2.6) starts with an
essay by Danie Mellor, which is followed by a conversation between this artist and scholar Tyson
Yunkaporta. Danie’s family portraits show his great-great-grandmother Ellen Kelly and his
great-grandmother May Kelly photographed by Alfred Atkinson ca. 1918 in Cairns, Queens-
land. They are holding Pelargonium leaves and use a draped banket as a backdrop. In Australia,
blankets of these kind are symbolically and historically loaded:

In the past they were distributed on “Blanket Days” to Aboriginal people as a form
of welfare along with four and tobacco. I also used the portrait of Ellen as the basis
for a mixed media painting/drawing [the cover image of this book] and changed the
blanket so it showed a rainforest scene

Danie told me in a personal email, and I could not help thinking immediately of the “blan-
kets given to Native Americans in the last century” mentioned by Faris (2003: 97), which were
“sometimes deliberately laced with smallpox”. And the story that the Taíno Cacique Hatuey
wanted to go to hell instead of heaven in order not to see such cruel people as the Spanish
invaders anymore (Williams 1944: 5).
The last contribution to this chapter was originally written in 2011 by Andrés Garay and
myself. We revisited and updated the piece in 2022, with the aim of showing Chambi as part of
a bilingual, mixed-race class in Cuzco that had access to both cultural worlds, the Spanish and
the Indigenous. His exceptional contribution in the photographic medium lies in the docu-
mentation and promotion of his native Peru’s cultural wealth. He served upper-class clients as
a superb image-maker, covered news stories and found splendid sujets for postcards, but mostly
his intention was to present and represent the Andean people as contemporary heirs of a form
of life and cultural expression based on and within a millennial tradition.

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References
Alloula, M. (1987) The Colonial Harem, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Azoulay, A. (2008) The Civil Contract of Photography, New York: Zone Books.
Faris, J. (2003) Navajo and Photography, in: Photography’s Other Histories, ed. C. Pinney and N. Peterson.
Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 87–99.
Ginzburg, C. (1989) From Aby Warburg to E. H. Gombrich: A Problem of Method, in: Clues, Myths, and
the Historical Method. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Guerra, C. (2022) Restitutions. Photography in Debt to Its Past, Introduction text for a conference cycle at
KBr Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona. [Link]/media/2022/02/[Link]
[Accessed 17 May 2022].
Lange, D. (1960) “The assignment I’ll never forget,” Popular Photography 46.
Low, M. (2003) The Japanese Colonia Eye: Science, Exploration and Empire, in: Photography’s Other His-
tories, ed. C. Pinney and N. Peterson. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 100–118.
Meister, S. H. (2018) Dorothea Lange: Migrant Mother. New York: Museum of Modern Art.
MoMA (2022) Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California March 1936, Gallery label from
2022, [Link]/collection/works/50989 [Accessed 17 May 2022].
Pardo, A. and Golbach, J. (eds.) (2018) Dorothea Lange: Politics of Seeing, London: Barbican and Paris: Jeu
de paume.
Pinney, C. and Peterson, N. (2003) Photography’s Other Histories, Durham, NC and London: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Poignant (2003) “The Making of Professional ‘Savages’: From P. T. Barnum (1883) to the Sunday Times
(1998), in: Photography’s Other Histories, ed. C. Pinney and N. Peterson. Durham, NC and London:
Duke University Press, pp. 55–84.
Schadow, G. J. (1835) National-Physiognomieen, Berlin: Sachse.
Stein, S. (2021) Migrant Mother, Migrant Gender. Reconsidering Dorothea Lange’s Iconic Portrait of Maternity,
London: MACK.
Tagg, J. (1993) The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Dissertation, Howard University.
Tsinhnahjinnie, H. J. (2003) When Is a Photograph Worth a Thousand Words? in: Photography’s Other
Histories, ed. C. Pinney and N. Peterson. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, pp. 40–52.
Wei, C. (1980) Foreign Railroad Interests in Manchuria: An Irritant in Chinese-Japanese Relations (1903–1937),
PhD dissertation, St. John’s University.
Williams, E. (1944) Capitalism and Slavery, republished 2022, London: Penguin Classics.
Young, J. (1966) The Research Activities of the South Manchurian Rallmey Compa, 1907–1945: A History and
Bibliography, New York: East Asian Institute. Columbia University.

2.1 THE RAILWAY AND ITS IMAGES

Decolonizing Landscapes Trough the Works of Chinese Visual Artists
Yining He

Introduction
In May 2021, I travelled through the mountains of Hebei and the grasslands of Inner Mongolia
to Erlianhot, on the northern border between China and Mongolia. I stayed in a guest house
next to the railway station in the city’s centre, where it was quiet and depressing. Before the
Erlian station closed due to the pandemic, it connected international passengers from Beijing
to Ulaanbaatar, the capital of the Mongolian People’s Republic, and Moscow, the capital of the
Russian Federation. Towards the end of the trip, a sandstorm from Mongolia swept across the
Inner Mongolian plains, and it arrived in my city the day after I came home. Although the trip
was far from ideal, it made me experience, physically and mentally, the critical role that a railway
plays in a border town and the signifcant impact that the closure of a railway station can have
on people’s mobility, economic transactions, and cultural exchanges.

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 Yining He

From the frst commercially operated railroad opened in Shanghai in July 1876 to the frst
railway designed and built solely by Chinese constructed in 1905–1909, railway development
in modern China has witnessed the history of imperialist aggression against China’s struggle
for independence. Although China was never colonized, it has been entangled with coloniality
since the Opium Wars. From 1840 onwards, the European and American capitalist countries,
led by Britain, forced China to sign many unequal treaties and through war turned China into
a market for their goods. Over the next nearly 100 years, the imperialist powers feverishly
plundered the use of roads and divided China’s resources by building railways in the Chinese
hinterland and across the borders.
After the founding of New China (1949), the independent construction and operation of
railways became a meaningful way for China to resist imperialism and decolonize. In the 1970s,
China’s involvement in the construction of the Tanzanian Railway in Africa became anti-
hegemonic cooperation between China and Africa during the Cold War. Today, with the rail-
ways connecting city and rural areas across the country and Sino-European trains playing an
indispensable role in the Belt and Road Initiative, it has become an essential resource for China’s
participation in new global geopolitical interactions. The railway has also become the focus of
some young Chinese artists who connect personal experiences to China’s collision with inter-
national geopolitical relations and global decolonial contexts.
Using the railway and its image as a narrative, I attempt to take the viewer into the moments
when history and the railway met through contemporary art practices. The aim is to reconsider
the complex role that the construction and planning of the railways played in imperial expan-
sion and colonization, as well as the perspectives and approaches of decolonizing landscape
through the following works.

Five Railways and Teir Images

The formation and development of global or regional political patterns are infuenced and even
conditioned by geographical conditions, which form the basis of the ancient science of geo-
politics. With every technological development and encroachment of war throughout history,
political relations between small villages and towns, countries, and regions and their surround-
ings, and indeed the globe, have changed. The invention of the railway in early 19th-century
Britain provided the immediate impetus for the acceleration of human civilization and the
development of the industrial revolution and capitalist empire.
Steam-powered trains travelled from the mines to the industrial cities (England), from
metropolises to the sparsely populated wilderness (United States), even across continents
(French Orient Express). They revolutionized human mobilities but signifcantly impacted the
unfair trade and widening cultural diferences that imperialism would bring to the world over
the next two centuries.
The year 2019 saw the 150th anniversary of the connection and ofcial opening of the Central
Pacifc Railroad (CPRR) in the United States. Stretching more than 3,000 kilometres and travers-
ing the entire North American continent, the Pacifc Railway was the world’s frst transcontinental
railway. The construction of the CPRR began in Sacramento in 1863 with a major labour short-
age due to the increasing mining industry and ongoing Civil War. The Central Pacifc turned
to the Chinese labour force, many of whom had come to California to work in the gold mines.
Originally from Wuyi, Guangzhou, and other places in the Pearl River Delta region, most
Chinese migrant workers met signifcant racial discrimination in the United States. Despite
these Chinese workers completing the CPRR seven years ahead of schedule, they have long
been forgotten in American historical records and the dust of history.

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When the toil became a false hope and death was inevitable, Cantonese rhymes from San
Francisco’s Chinatown have become one of the surviving ‘legacies’ of these Chinese workers, as
Songs of Golden Mountain recorded:

A transient living beneath a stranger’s fence.

Cruelties increase day by day.
Though innocent, I am arrested and thrown in jail;
Pathetic the lonely bachelors stranded in a foreign land.
O, let’s all go home.
Spare ourselves of this mighty tyrant.
The outside world may be entertaining at times;
But life a home is just as bustling.
(Hom 1992: 90)

Prior to his frst trip to the American West, Zheng Andong, a former MFA candidate in
photography at the Rhode Island School of Design, researched the photographic history of
American railways and Chinese workers, during which he became aware of the connection
between the lack of historical images and the crisis of Chinese identity in North America.
In A Question from China, Zheng Andong traces the history of Chinese immigrants in the
United States and embarks on a journey to fnd the reality of “Chineseness” in the American
West (Figure 2.5).
In constructing the projects, Zheng tried to fnd traces of Chinese labourers building the
CPRR by photographing relics of the railroad and mining industry. From the Grand Canyon
in Arizona to the old mines of South American Canyon, Nevada, he found much evidence that
proves the Chinese workers’ existence from diferent historical periods in the wilderness due
to the high desert climate (Ibrahim 2019). He also visited Chinatown motels and Chinese-run
cafes, where he took portraits of the current hotel workers and students who struggle to live in
American society.
In A Question from China, Zheng introduces the images to a broader knowledge network
about American history, ‘Chinese’ identity politics, and visual culture through two strategies.
One is the reference to classic images in the history of art and photography. In 2019, dressed as
an American cowboy of the West American, he features himself looking down on the transcon-
tinental railway built by Chinese labourers 150 years ago. Based on the photograph Indian View-
ing Railroad from Top of Palisades, taken by Alfred A. Hart (Figure 2.4, chapter introduction), the
artist’s use of a large-format camera captures his back and the landscape in front of him where
Indians once lived. While subtly echoing the historical photograph, Zheng’s photograph also
suggests the relationship between the people who lived on the land, the owners of the land, and
the people who built the railway upon it. These complex issues frame the current discussion of
decolonizing landscape in the US context.
The other way connecting his work to both trails of Chinese workers in the United States and
photography is the use of refectors, shutter lines, and artifcial light, which are metaphors for
the medium and which the artist calls “concrete gestures” for creating photographs in the face
of the current environment. In a body of work titled The Oriental Poppies in Tuscarora, Nevada,
Zheng used a white refector on the back of the poppies (Figure 2.6), which implied that this
plant accompanied Chinese workers to the American West, in the sense that they “attempt to
give these photographs a tone of search, investigation, and evidence” (Zheng 2020: 68).
Two years before the construction of the American Pacifc Railroad, the greatest theorist of
machinery, Franz Reuleaux, caught the double-crossing nature of the machine when he defned

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Figure 2.5 Zheng Andong, Self-Portrait (A Chinese Cowboy), from the series A Question From China,
photography, 2018.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

it as the merciless transformer of “the cosmical freedom of endless forces” into the “order and
law which no ordinary external force can shake” (Schivelbusch 2014: xxi). The construction of
railways in the colonies became an essential means of expanding the empire’s frontiers, strength-
ening its domination, and plundering wealth in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
The construction and operation of the railways in modern China under the control and
infuence of the imperialist powers greatly reduced the geographical distance in transport
between China’s vast hinterland and the coastal and riverine ports of commerce. With the
extension of the railways, an increasing number of dominating centres in varying sizes under
imperialist control were formed on mainland China.
In the mid to late 19th century, the British and French powers entered Southeast Asia
and the Yunnan Province of China, whose rich mineral wealth became a coveted treasure
for France. After the Sino-French War in 1885, France concluded the Sino-French Treaty of

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Figure 2.6 Zheng Andong, Tuscarora Poppies, from the series A Question From China, 2018.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Vietnam with the Qing government, acquiring the “right of protection” over Vietnam and the
right of trade and railway construction in the southwestern provinces of China.
Yunnan is located on a high plateau, with many rivers and turbulent waters, which are not
conducive to shipping. At the same time, the land route is heavily paved with mountains and
rugged trails, making it impossible for vehicles to travel and relying on horse gangs to transport
goods, which was time consuming and labour intensive. Once the Yunnan-Yue Railway was
opened for business, it held a monopoly in the transport business of the whole province of
Yunnan and its neighbouring regions. The French colonialists took advantage of this format to
attract as much cargo fow as possible from the traditional trading systems of the surrounding
areas, operating on a policy of high tarifs to extract maximum beneft (Jin and Xu 2000: 62).

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Figure 2.7 Cheng Xinhao, screen shot from Linear Perspective (2020), single-channel video, 21’23”, from
the series To the Ocean, 2018–ongoing.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Kunming-born artist Cheng Xinhao combines his childhood interest in the Yunnan-Vietnam
Railway with his long-standing research into the history and geography of Kunming and the
Yunnan region. Having completed a series of artistic projects that address the geography, space
and culture of “minority peoples in the borderlands”, in 2018, he launched a project entitled To
the Ocean, which seeks to link Kunming or Yunnan with the broader ‘Zomiya’ region, continu-
ing his work and research in an inland-sea spatial structure. To the Ocean currently consists of
three performance videos (Figure 2.7) and a book created by the artists.
In the frst short flm, The Third Line, the artist chooses to walk between two railway tracks
at night, bending down to create a third line between and parallel to the two tracks with rubble
from the railway. The background sounds of insects and dogs barking are suddenly joined by
the sound of a train whistle, the volume of which gets higher and higher, echoing between the
eardrums until the artist completes the project the last second before the train arrives.
Compared to The Third Line, Cheng Xinhao’s To the Ocean (Figure 2.8) is one of his most
ambitious projects to date. Starting in Kunming, he followed the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway for
446 kilometres in 19 days, picking up one ballast stone per kilometre and carrying it on his back
until he reached the Vietnamese border with a backpack weighing 30 kilograms. The increasing
weight on the back of the artist reminds the viewer of the labour of railway workers behind the
colonial history and the unequal fow of natural resources, among other issues.
In parallel with this project, Cheng Xinhao sent a letter to a fctional friend each night dur-
ing the trek, which he delivered to the mailboxes of his friends. At the end of the trek, a total
of 24 emails were collected. In early 2021, an artist’s book entitled 24 Emails from the Railroad
was published by Jiazazhi Press, containing the text of these 24 emails and the screenshots of the
video To the Ocean, presented to the viewer in a document-like manner.
After summing up his visual experience of flming, the artist, in his 2020 work The Perspective
of Parallel Lines, sees the orthogonal crossing of two railways as a stage on which contrived and
occasional events and encounters are played out simultaneously. On this land, which connects
the land and the sea, Cheng Xinhao continues to explore the relationship between the ‘centre’
and the ‘periphery’, writing a new history through his performance.

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Figure 2.8 Cheng Xinhao, Book spread, 24 Emails From the Railroad, published by Jiazazhi, 2020, from
the series To the Ocean, 2018–ongoing.
Source: Courtesy of the artist.

Built almost simultaneously with the Yunnan-Vietnam Railway, the Siberian Railway, com-
missioned by Alexander III and Crown Prince Nicholas (later Nicholas II) and placed under
the supervision of the Russian government, was completed in 1916. It links Moscow with the
Russian Far East, with branch lines to Mongolia, China, and North Korea, making it the long-
est railway line globally, also known as the Siberian Landbridge.
Along this magnifcent route there is a city called Vladivostok in Russian, whose other name –
Haishenwai – appears loudly in history textbooks and people’s memories. Haishenwai comes
from the old Manchurian aboriginal language and translates into Chinese as a fshing village by
the sea. In 1860, the Treaty of Beijing saw the Qing government lose its ownership of Haishen-
wai, which was then renamed Vladivostok by Russia, meaning ‘ruling the East’.
In a long-standing study of Chinese in Vladivostok, Russian researchers of Far Eastern locali-
ties Nelli Miz and D.A. Ancha recorded that the frst Chinese began to participate in construct-
ing the port city in 1872, soon after the town was granted the status of Russia’s main port on
the Pacifc Ocean (Miz and Ancha 2016: 1). Since 1880, no less than a third of Vladivostok’s
inhabitants have been involved in the diferent sectors of the city’s life, including construction,
trade, services, handicrafts, agriculture, and transport.
Over the course of half a century, as the Chinese community grew in numbers and played an
increasingly important role in all walks of life, the eradication of the Chinese community in the
‘Millionka’ became the primary target of the Soviet NKVD’s eradication program in the 1930s.
Over the course of a decade, claiming to be eliminating spies, a campaign of terror turned into

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an ethnic cleansing of the Chinese, leaving behind a sad and forgotten history of the 100,000
Chinese who had built and lived on the land.
“The greatest ‘evil’ that the Chinese did here was that they left Vladivostok all at once” (Miz
and Ancha 2016: 111) is a quote from Chinese in Vladivostok. In confronting a ferocious aspect of
recent Russian history, the two authors have chosen to relay the history of the Chinese depar-
ture in a euphemistic way to future generations in the voice of ordinary citizens of Vladivostok.
In 2018, Ma Haijiao was invited to Vladivostok by ZARYA Contemporary Art Centre to
participate in an artist residency program. His brief experience in the city became a source of
inspiration for the artist’s work. He completed two series of works entitled In a Quiet Place and
Invisible Shore which are thoughtful responses to the city’s Chinese history and social memory.
In a Quiet Place is a series of black-and-white triptych photographs in which Ma Haijiao uses
slogans to hang sentences in a forest in Vladivostok and then uses photography to document them.
The empty forest and the black-and-white panels hanging from the tree trunks cannot help but
evoke visual metaphors of hunting and genocide, thus inspiring the viewer to connect with the
ups and downs of the Chinese in Vladivostok (Figure 2.9). At the site of the 2020 Jimei x Arles
Discovery Award, Ma Haijiao inscribed the sentence on the exhibition wall in the nominated
exhibition by curator Yu Miao, constructing a more diverse connotation between image and text.
If In a Quiet Place is a tribute to the memory of those Chinese who have passed away, Invisible
Shore describes Ma Haijiao’s visual response to his close encounter with the Chinese community

Figure 2.9 Ma Haijiao, In a Quiet Place-1, 2018.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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in his work and life in Vladivostok. The flm contains nine black-and-white seascapes in which
a closer look reveals wooden stakes, deliberately thrown by Ma Haijiao, foating on the sea.
These stakes, of varying lengths, are engraved with Chinese words that frequently appear in
the Russian-speaking world, including “Safe travels”, “The view is unique”, and “Unlimited
meat”. They appear on Xingkai Lake, which divides the Russian Chinese border, and on the
sea around Vladivostok, each carried far away with the waves or as a metaphor for the identity
of the current migrants. Through these two groups of works, Ma Haijiao connects the past and
present of Chinese migrants in Vladivostok and inspires a new dialogue (Figure 2.10).
The narrative of the Trans-Eurasia Logistics – also called China-Europe Express – has
received more attention in the mainstream media in recent years than that of the American
Pacifc Railway, the Yunnan-Vietnam route, and the Siberian Railway.
With the introduction of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, the China Railway Express to
Europe, which relies on the China-Europe railway, has become an essential medium in China’s
freight system to and from Europe. Prior to this, the transport of large-scale goods between China
and Europe required a voyage from the hinterland to the coastal ports, which took approxi-
mately 45 days to complete. With the passage of the China-Europe shuttle train, the transit time
for goods has been reduced by 2/3, making inland cities such as Chengdu, Chongqing, Almaty,
Budapest, Warsaw, and Prague in China and Europe new hubs for imports and exports.
In 2018, Li Yannan and Shi Yangkun each embarked on a visual exploration of the route
in cities along the China-Europe Railway. Li Yannan completed his project in the port cit-
ies of Alashankou and Horgos, where he presented natural scenes of the western ports of the
China-Europe railway. Horgos is a Chinese city straddling the border with Kazakhstan located
in Xinjiang, which used to be a trading post along the northern route of the ancient Silk Road.

Figure 2.10 Ma Haijiao, Invisible Shore #1 – Be Ever Successful, 2018.

Source: Courtesy of the artist.

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In the vivid description of writer Wade Shepard,

The place sits a tick from the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility, the farthest point on
earth from an ocean, near the fabled region which Herodotus claimed to be inhabited
by creatures that had the bodies of lions and the heads and wings of eagles, where the
North Wind originated from a cave.
(2017)

However, as Horgos is now being positioned to become a prime robot manufacturing and
export hub, Li’s photographs show the busy lives of workers and locals both in the railway sys-
tem and the city, presenting the audience with series of images of the Chinese western border
cities that are both familiar and unfamiliar.
Meanwhile, in Shi Yangkun’s work, a vineyard farmer gazing into the camera, a wine trader
looking levelly into a tilted glass, and a logistics line worker looking at a warehouse shelf trans-
port the viewer to the other side of the China-Europe railway. Shi travelled to Valladolid in
Spain, Duisburg in Germany, and Prague in the Czech Republic, all important port cities along
the railway. In contrast to Li Yanan’s documents mainly of the landscape and environment por-
traits, his report focused on the stories of individuals working behind the local industries. Shi
also examined the old industrial settlements and new leisure and recreational facilities around
the railway, connecting the history and present of China-Europe trade, post-industrial cities,
and the China-Europe railway in the new landscape.
Covering these fve cities on the Central European railway, Li Yanan and Shi Yangkun
outline a contemporary photographic examination of the New Silk Road, drawing a new
geopolitical relationship between China and Europe in dialogue with each other. It also shows
the impact that new supply chains are having on changes to the Trans-Eurasia industrial cities.
If the Chinese and European continents are a geographical community of shared destiny,
then China and Africa, as long-standing allies, face a common development task. The last pro-
ject is one of Pu Yingwei’s long-running projects around the topic of China-Africa Europe –
Photo Ethics: A Photo Album of China-Africa. Let us begin with a photographic album page that
traces the history of friendship in the China-Africa narrative repeatedly.
The top half of a reproduced photobook page presents a colossal billboard of unknown dates.
An awkward Chinese anchors the location in Mpoko Farm in the Central African Republic,
assisted by the People’s Republic of China. Two historical photographs dating back to the
1970s, with annotations in Chinese, are added underneath, drawing the storyline back to the
Sino-African friendship during the construction of the TAZARA (Tanzania Zambia Railway
Authority).
The TAZARA is a major transport artery between East Africa and Central and South Africa.
With the total length of 1,860 km, construction of the Tanzanian Railway began in 1970 and
was completed in 1975, linking the landlocked copper belt of Zambia with the Indian Ocean
port city of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania.
The railway was built during the Cold War, when the confrontation between capitalism and
socialism in Africa was intensifying, and China chose to unite African forces with fnancial and
technical assistance to counter the hegemony and neo-colonialism of the United States and the
Soviet Union in Africa. 1976 saw the ofcial takeover of the railway by the Tanzanian Railway
Authority; according to Jamie Monson,

The Cold War era was a time of pan-African aspirations throughout the continent,
and TAZARA represented the concrete realization of pan-African development

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cooperation. This contributed to the symbolic signifcance of the TAZARA project,

for not only would Chinese and Africans cooperate in an anti-hegemonic project, but
Tanzanians and Zambians would dismantle the boundaries of colonial-era transport
infrastructures.
(Monson 2011: 4)

Although like Ma Haijiao, Pu Yingwei does not directly draw from the railway, the narra-
tive of China-Africa relations built up by the Tanzanian Railway is a cornerstone of the study
of China-Africa history and is at the same time a facet of the complex history of China-Africa
presented in The Ethics of Portraiture: A Photographic Collection of China-Africa.
Pu Yingwei left China in 2013 to study in France. On the one hand, the social transfor-
mations he experienced during his studies in Europe brought the encounters and realities of
African migrants to the forefront of his mind. On the other hand, the opportunities presented
by the ongoing dialogue between China and Africa in recent years, and the artist’s family back-
ground in this context, have simultaneously inspired Pu Yingwei to ask critical questions about
China-Africa relations, Africa, and Africanness.
The ‘photobook’ contains photographs of three Chinese people with diferent identities,
within the framework given by Pu Yingwei, and the results of the artist’s interviews, retakes,
and re-photographs of these three people and the photographs they took. This collection of
images of China and Africa from diferent periods, mixing reality and fction, points to the
complex fact of China and Africa while also bringing the viewer’s perspective to the history of
photography on issues such as the gaze, colonial expansion, and fake news, showing the artist’s
pictorial strategies in dealing with the mix of past and present.

Conclusion
The previous works are in dialogue around railway projects from diferent historical periods.
Although the topics are various, they show the interest of young Chinese artists in the history
of empire, geopolitics, and global decolonization contexts.
According to Tifany Kaewen Dang,

Historically, landscape has been used as a disciplinary tool to facilitate the control of
land and to naturalize colonial hegemonies, including the cultural framing of land-
scape through art and architecture.
(2021: 1006)

Here, the art practitioners examine the railway and its images as a historical investigation.
They seek to return to the landscapes entangled with ‘coloniality’, refect critically on the
coloniality of the landscape, and explore ways of reinterpreting the attribution of the landscape.
In an important book on landscape photography, Land Matter, Liz Wells refers to landscape
as a genre within visual art, shares investigative concerns with geography, and feeds into geo-
graphic imagination (2011: 3). However, the research of decolonizing landscape in the feld of
photographic art has not yet generated a geography and landscape study, let alone the study of
decolonial landscape in China’s photographic art.
This essay serves as an attempt to consider decolonizing landscape in both photographic and
global contexts with the richness of the issues presented in the previously mentioned works. Note
that the case studies of this paper are drawn from my earlier research on ‘Reframing New Geo-
politics’, which was partly published in the January issue of Shanghai Photography magazine, 2021.

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References
Dang, T. K. (2021) “Decolonizing Landscape”, Landscape Research, 46(7).
Hom, M. K. (1992) Songs of Gold Mountain: Cantonese Rhymes from San Francisco Chinatown. London:
University of California Press.
Ibrahim, A. (2019) “In photographing the American west, Andong Zheng uncovers hidden traces of
Chinese history”. It’s Nice That, November 14. [Link]/articles/andong-zheng-a-chinese-
question-photography-141119 [Accessed 24 January 2022].
Jin, S. and Xu, W. (2000) History of Chinese Railways. Beijing: China Railway Publishing House.
Miz, N. and Ancha, U. (2016) D.A. Chinese in Vladivostok: A Chapter in the History of Vladivostok (1870–
1938). Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press.
Monson, J. (2011) Africa’s Freedom Railway: How a Chinese Development Project Changed Lives and Livelihoods
in Tanzania. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, p. 4.
Schivelbusch, W. (2014) The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Cen-
tury. Oakland, CA: University of California Press.
Shepard, W. (2017) “Horgos: The frst new city of the new silk road emerges as a robot manufacturing
hub”. Forbes, January 9. [Link]/sites/wadeshepard/2017/01/09/horgos-the-frst-new-city-of-
the-new-silk-road-becomes-a-hub-for-robots/?sh=10055553245e [Accessed 24 January 2022].
Wells, L. (2011) Land Matters: Landscape Photography, Culture and Identity. London: I. B. Tauris.
Zheng, A. (2020) “Testimonies of the Travellers”, Tightbelt, 1.

2.2 THROUGH FA‘AFAFABULOUS GLASSES

An Interview with Yuki Kihara
Nina Tonga
Yuki Kihara (b. 1975, Sāmoa) is an interdisciplinary artist of Sāmoan and Japanese decent. Kihara is
based in the island nation of Sāmoa, and her practice interrogates colonial pasts in the Pacifc from
the postcolonial present. Her engagement with photographic archives and museum collections
has informed her visual and curatorial practise, which has sought to address colonialism and the
intersection of race, gender, spirituality and sexuality in the Pacifc. Kihara identifes as a fa‘afafne,
one of four culturally recognized genders in Sāmoa, but they’re not legally recognized.1 The term
fa‘afafne means ‘in the manner of a woman’, a term that describes individuals who were assigned
male sex at birth and express their gender in a feminine way (Kihara 2022). Through her re-use
and reinterpretation of archival photographs, Kihara exposes and subverts the perpetuation of what
Indigenous scholar Maria Lugones describes as the “colonial gender system”; she states:

Colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the colo-
nized. It imposed a new gender system that created very diferent arrangements for
colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced
many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and a mode of organization of
relations of production, property, of cosmologies and ways of knowing.
(Lugones 2007: 186–209)

Across Kihara’s oeuvre, she has drawn on photographic archives to highlight the critical role
of the camera as part of constructing and disseminating colonial gender systems. In the Pacifc,
photography was used extensively from the 19th century onwards by missionaries, colonial
administrators and entrepreneurial photographers. As Zimbabwean novelist Yvonne Vera com-
ments of the camera as a vital aspect of European colonialism, “the camera has often been a
dire instrument. In Africa, as in most parts of the dispossessed, the camera arrives as part of the
colonial paraphernalia, together with the gun and the bible” (Vera quoted in Cole 2019).

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Early photographs, particularly those taken during the colonial period in parts of the Pacifc,
refect varied interests from the economic to the evangelical.2 By the 1890s, technological
advances in photographic practices aided the mass production of photographs and the global
dissemination of images of the Pacifc (Quanchi 2020). At the same time, major ports across
the Pacifc, including Port Moresby (Papua New Guinea), Apia (Sāmoa), Suva (Fiji), Papeete
(Tahiti), Noumea (New Caledonia) and Honolulu (Hawai’i), had resident photographers cater-
ing to both an Indigenous clientele and the rapidly growing tourist demands for paradisical
imagery of exotic places and peoples (Quanchi 2020).
Staged portraits of Pacifc Island peoples as stereotypical ‘native belles’ and maidens or noble
savages found global dissemination as cartes de visite and postcards as well as scientifc publica-
tions. The wide dissemination of this imagery is the result of a broader cultural phenomenon
during the colonial period whereby photographs representing the ‘Pacifc’ did not need to be
made with scientifc intent to be acquired into European research collections (Manfredi 2018).
As such, the extant collections of ‘South Seas’ photography vary in subject matter, yet collec-
tively they manifest the construction of the Pacifc under a unifying regional framework in the
European imagination. Such homogenous framing conceptually underpins many of the ‘South
Seas’ photographs which helped to visually construct a context where imperial control was
deemed possible. (Fry 2019). Similarly, photographs of Pacifc peoples as colonized subjects or
‘others’ also served to facilitate the dominance of the colonizer.
As an artist, Kihara exercises an Indigenous agency throughout her practice that challenges
singular and dominant historical narratives. In 2017, Kihara created a series of handmade
and digital collage works in the exhibition Coconuts that Grow from Concrete that visualize the
connections between European paintings traditions and Sāmoan colonial photographs taken
by New Zealand photographers, including Thomas Andrew, Alfred John Tattersall and the
Dunedin-based studio the Burton Brothers. In works such as Odalisque (After Boucher), 2017
Kihara draws a visual parallel between the open eroticism of a 20th-century photograph of
a young Sāmoan woman reclining topless on an ‘ie sina and that of the voluptuous woman
enveloped in lush fabrics baring her buttocks in the painting Odalisque, 1745, by François
Boucher. Kihara’s merging of these works heightens their voyeuristic gaze whilst simultane-
ously speaking to the entangled legacies of Sāmoan colonial photography and the conventions
and ideologies of Western art.
Since 2002, Kihara has created and embodied the character ‘Salomé’, who is distinguished
by a black Victorian mourning dress and she appears in moving images, photographs and per-
formances. The character was inspired by the photograph ‘Samoan Half Caste’ (1886) by New
Zealand photographer Thomas Andrew, who was resident in Sāmoa from 1891 until his death
in 1939 (Figure 2.11). The photograph is a portrait is of an unnamed woman dressed in a dark
silk gown seated on a simple wooden chair. A woven pandanus mat draped behind her serves
as a backdrop. Unlike the more passive portrayals of Sāmoan women at the time, the sitter of
this portrait has an active gaze and looks directly at the camera. Kihara’s Salomé draws upon
the confdence of this unnamed portrait and from the biblical story of Salomé and the later
realization of her as a femme fatale in Oscar Wilde’s late 19th-century drama (Bucknell 1993).
The spectral appearance of Salomé in Kihara’s work signals an Indigenous temporality, enabling
Kihara to reclaim the past whilst witnessing – and at times mourning – the present (Treagus
and Syes 2017). This is embodied acutely in her recent photographic series Where Do We Come
from? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which was shot in Sāmoa after Cyclone Evan, where
several photographs capture the destruction left in its wake.
Kihara’s extensive artistic research on colonial photographic practices in Sāmoa and her use
of archival photography are decolonial strategies to assert visual sovereignty in the present. As a

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Figure 2.11 Thomas Andrew, Samoan Half Caste. From the album: Views in the Pacifc Islands, 1886.
Source: [Link]

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 Trough Fa‘afafabulous Glasses

Sāmoan artist, she breathes life into archival photographs that acknowledges the persistence of
Indigenous histories within them.
Following is an extended transcript of an interview flmed between Yuki Kihara and Nina
Tonga at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in 2021.

NINA TONGA: Throughout the 1990s and into the early 2000s an unapologetic fashion activism
emerged in Auckland that found its way into the fashion editorials of urban magazines and
fashion publications. Your series Savage Nobility, 2001 originally shot as a fashion editorial
in Pulp magazine is emblematic of the fashion activism that began in the early 1990s. The
suite of photographs, which includes Daughter of the High Chief, 2001 and The High Chief
and His Subjects, 2001 evokes stereotypical studio portraits of Pacifc peoples as ‘noble sav-
ages’ and ‘dusky maidens’ from the 19th and 20th century. Countering the often ‘unknown’
attribution of subjects in these historic photographs, Kihara cast prominent members of
the Pacifc community including playwright and director Oscar Kightly, musicians Igelese
Ete and Teremoana Rapley. There is a sense of power reclaimed in these chiefy images,
each of the subjects dressed in garments by high-end New Zealander designers – such as
Zambesi and Nom*d – styled with contemporary jewellery pieces, a fue (fy whisk) and
ulafala (pandanus key necklace), the chiefy accoutrements of a matai (Sāmoan chief). Dress
and re-dress are consistent threads of your early photographic practice. Where does this
sensibility stem from?
YUKI KIHARA: I’m actually formally trained as a fashion designer, and I studied at Wellington
Polytechnic for four years. When I graduated and I tried to look for work for myself in
the fashion industry, nobody would employ me because a lot of the work that I was pro-
ducing was very sculptural and very avant-garde. So I ended up working in the flm and
television industry and in performing arts, working on wardrobe management. That led
me to working as a freelance fashion editor for a variety of magazines such as Staple, Pulp
magazine, Pavement magazine and stints with mainstream newspapers. A lot of that experi-
ence, working within the fashion industry, wardrobe management and costume within the
performing arts, television and flm industry, informs much of the work that I’m creating
today. The highly staged nature of my work is very much informed by the process involved
in the construction of mise-en-scène in performing arts and flm production.
NT: This notion of dress, fashion and production is evident in some of your earliest work
which highlighted the politically conscious street fashion that emerged in the early 2000s.
Similarly to your work in publishing, the installation Teuanoa’i–Adorn to Excess 1999 gave
visibility to the identity-driven politics of the local t-shirt market that emerged in Auckland
at the same time. The popularity of these t-shirts refected an alignment with the politi-
cally charged and witty commentary on issues such as racism and economic exploitation.
Your installation draws directly on this popular vernacular using humour as a Trojan horse
of sorts.
YK: It was back in 2001 that Te Papa acquired the series of t-shirts that bastardised corpo-
rate New Zealand logos, where common brands you see in Pacifc households were sub-
verted to expose their hidden capitalist agendas. Examples, among others, included KFC
as ‘KKK’, Warehouse department store as ‘Whore house’, and Countdown supermarket as
‘Coconut brown’ to name a few. These series of t-shirts were jointly presented alongside
the work of Pip Culbert in a two-person exhibition entitled More or Less, in 2001. My
work represented the ‘more’ factor, where I added context to the t-shirts, which is the
‘more’ component, while Pip Culbert was the ‘less’ component, where her work featured
seams of clothes pinned against the wall as wall drawings.

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The More or Less exhibition was a subversive commentary that complemented a major
retrospective of a Gianni Versace exhibition, which featured the famous Liz Hurley dress
with the safety pins. My t-shirts drew some media controversy, questioning the nature of
copyright, which led to going into a discussion with Te Papa whether we should take the
T-shirts down to avoid further controversy. I replied to Te Papa that if they couldn’t back
up what I was saying in my work, I might as well withdraw the exhibition – but I’m really
glad that Te Papa didn’t.
NT: Thinking of the role of dress in your work I fnd it interesting that your research has led
you to re-dress colonial photography in a way that feels interventionist. I’m recalling your
recent series Black Sunday 2001 where you reproduced tourist and ethnographic photo-
graphs with new elements such as the bright t-shirts that covered up the previously topless
women making tapa in Gossip Sessions from 2001 or the funky pink sunglasses donned by a
Sāmoan chief in See No Evil, Speak no Evil of the same year. These re-dressings also surface
the agency and power of Indigenous peoples in colonial encounter where many actively
sought foreign goods for their own purpose.
In your later works you embody and occupy the colonial photograph in works such
as the sepia toned series Fa‘afafne: In the Manner of a Woman, 2005. Can I ask you what
attracted you to archives and museum collections?
YK: My interest in archival material came about from when I was a fashion student at Wel-
lington Polytechnic, where there was an assignment looking at regalia from world cultures.
While everybody in my class was busy looking at bias cut dresses or Christian Dior and
Balenciaga, I was interested in looking at adornments and regalia from the Pacifc and,
specifcally, Sāmoa. I visited the Alexander Turnbull Library and Te Papa several times and
found inspiration for my assignment.
That’s where I discovered photographs of Alfred Tattersall and Thomas Andrew at Te
Papa archives. Upon inspecting the photos, I wondered why Sāmoans appeared dramatized
– because this wasn’t the Sāmoan people that I knew. They were romantic depictions of
the Pacifc and, specifcally, Sāmoa as a tropical paradise flled with dusky maidens, noble
savages and cannibals. I also realised the photographers taking these photographs used simi-
lar methods to my work as a fashion stylist or as a fashion editor using photography and
performance as a form of fctional storytelling.
As a fashion editor, I had to write the script, develop the budget, provide the theme,
employ the crew, and convey the messages of the collections and what designers were
making at the time. Then I realised that ‘oh, okay, I can actually use this methodology in
fashion and subvert the photographic process and the dynamic to speak about my Sāmoan
experience living as a diaspora.
NT: Fa‘afafne: In the Manner of a Woman is a critically signifcant work in contemporary art in
New Zealand and has received much deserved international recognition for its champion-
ing of Indigenous gender systems. In the accompanying exhibition essay, the late artist and
curator Jim Vivieaere critiqued postmodern theorist Judith Butler’s theories as ignoring the
role of race and ethnicity in relation to subjecthood. Fa‘afafne: In the Manner of a Woman
seems to manifest this critique through your diferent self-portraits that form the series.
YK: The Fa‘afafne series (Figures 2.12–2.14) that is part of the Te Papa collection, that work
was made in 2005 and came about after many failed attempts at searching for Fa‘afafne in
photographic archives. Later I realized that the sitters in the photographs were orientated
to conform towards colonial heteronormativity in order to appeal to the commercial mar-
ket so I wanted to counteract that by highlighting Indigenous genders in the Pacifc and,
specifcally, Sāmoa and to challenge the heteronormative colonial gaze.

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Figure 2.12 Yuki Kihara, Fa‘afafne – In the Manner of a Woman (2005/20) triptych; pigment print on
paper, printed images: 480 × 640 mm.

Figure 2.13 Yuki Kihara, Ulugali’i Samoa – Samoan Couple (2005/20) pigment print on paper, mount size
910 × 710 mm, printed image 640 × 480 mm.

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Figure 2.14 Yuki Kihara, My Samoan Girl (2005/20) pigment print on paper, mount size 910 × 710 mm,
printed image 640 × 480 mm.

NT: In Fa‘afafne: In the Manner of a Woman your presence in the photograph weaves in an auto-
biographical element. Can you share how Fa‘afafne ft within a Sāmoan gender system?
YK: Customarily, we have four genders in Sāmoa: fa‘afafne – those assigned male at birth who
express a gender in a feminine way; fa‘atama – those assigned female at birth who express
their gender in a masculine way; fafne – a cisgender woman; and tane – a cisgender
man. Legally, however, Sāmoa only recognizes male and female with the heteronormative
view that assumes that a person’s biological sex determines their gender which is clearly
not true.

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But I want to delve a little bit deeper into the politics about how gender has been iden-
tifed in a legal sense. Because for me, when you talk about M and F, male and female, they
are medical terms associated to people’s anatomical sex – not necessarily gender. When
you’re born male, that is your biological anatomical construct, but that doesn’t necessarily
mean that you’re going to grow up as a man. I’m a fa‘afafne: I was biologically born male
and I live my gender as a woman. Therefore, if governments are looking to accurately
collect data based on people’s gender identifcation, then they should abolish M or F alto-
gether. In my New Zealand passport, however, I have an F on my passport. When people
ask me what the F stands for, I say ‘F for fa‘afafne’.
NT: How has this fuid framework of gender started to shape your practice as an artist and your
representation of gender?
YK: The Fa‘afafne series was born out of frustration and anger. Back then, I wasn’t a New
Zealand citizen – I was a Sāmoan permanent resident. I was still using my Sāmoan pass-
port as my ID, which featured my sex as being M. Every time I had to submit a request to
renew my weekly unemployment government wage, I had to consult a WINZ (Work and
Income New Zealand) caseworker in Ponsonby which required me to show my passport
which I frequently used as my ID. One day when I presented my passport to the WINZ
caseworker who was a cisgender man, the caseworker asked me, ‘Why is your Samoan pass-
port lists you as an M?’ ‘Well, it’s because I’m a fa‘afafne, so I’m biologically born male and
I live my gender as a woman.’ Then the case worker said to me, ‘Oh, so you’re a tranny?’
I said, ‘Well, um, I guess so.’ At that time, I didn’t really want to correct the caseworker
because I still wanted to get my dole. So I would just endure the bullshit just to get the
unemployment beneft.
Then he proceeded to tell me, ‘my wife and I, we always wanted to have a threesome
with a tranny.’ I felt like that was so inappropriate. But when you’re living as a Fa‘afafne in
Aotearoa, on welfare and nobody gives you a job, that’s the kind of BS I had to constantly
put up with being made to feel ashamed of being unemployed and a Fa‘afafne. That’s
partly the motivation behind making the Fa‘afafne series to help generate discussions and
build knowledge around it.
In the Fa‘afafne series, I turned the camera upon myself by using my body as an artistic
material to manifest various shades of Indigenous gender identities in Sāmoa to open up
a space to talk about the merits of gender and its complexity. That was the intent. I have
completed the work, but the thinking carried on. It has never stopped. It continues to
evolve: not just the way that I think about gender, but also how gender intersects with class,
race, gender politics, culture, ability, disability, access, inclusion, exclusion, borders – and
who are these borders made by and what for?
NT: Turning the camera upon yourself is incredibly brave and calls for revisionist ways of look-
ing and making. At the same time, I think it requires new references and terms, perhaps a
new discourse? Are you thinking about this?
YK: When the Fa‘afafne series went public and began featured in numerous exhibitions inter-
nationally, it had also meant that I needed to come out in public as a Fa‘afafne because
I wanted to make it clear that the photographic series wasn’t produced by an outsider com-
menting on Fa‘afafne, given that my Japanese name might cause suspicion on the intent
behind the work. Every time the Fa‘afafne series was exhibited, I had to be prepared to
take hits against me. I also refrain from presenting the Fa‘afafne series in Sāmoa because
I don’t want my family to be a target of ridicule. I understood over time, however, why
many Fa‘afafne often lead discrete lives in fear of discrimination that can also be violent.

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To be honest, I wish the Fa‘afafne series wasn’t relevant because its relevance highlights the
zeitgeist of the time that Fa‘afafne series are questioning.
I’ve come up with a series of words in thinking broadly about this post-colonial Fa‘afafne
critique or the Fa‘afafne lens. Then I thought, well, maybe it could be fa‘afaqueer. It could
be fa‘afaqueering, or maybe even Fa‘afafeminism – it’s all of the above. I’ve also been think-
ing about post-colonial camp. When we think about the word ‘camp’, it’s used primarily
to subvert heteronormativity, but as a postcolonial Fa‘afafne, the notion of camp goes
beyond the subversion of heteronormativity to also consider its intersectionality with race,
class, ability and gender politics. Heteronormativity today is also pervasive in museum
spaces where Fa‘afafne, trans and gender non-binary persons are often not considered as
an audience.
NT: What do you think is the role of artists in museums in terms of helping us to address het-
eronormativity through further discourse and curatorial strategy?
YK: The voices of the Fa‘afafne community needs to be heard at the time when the inequal-
ity brought by the Covid-19 era has prioritized what bell hooks calls “white supremacist
capitalist patriarchy”.
Part of the reason I was appointed as a fellow in 2017 by the National Museum of World
Cultures in The Netherlands was to address the very questions you posed, as many muse-
ums around the world today are being called into question for their role in both historical
and ongoing subjugation & oppression of BIPOCLGBTIQ+ communities. As a fellow, it
was important for me that the museum staf engaged with me not just in my formal role
but for me to be able to look them in the eye and say “Who benefts from your museum?
Who is it you want to empower?” Through this line of inquiry, I hope I can use position-
ality as an artist to introduce new forms of engagement, new ways of looking at material
culture, new ways of interpreting history, that’s often hidden underneath in plain sight, but
it takes somebody from the outside especially an artist, to excavate these hidden meanings
and histories and narratives – that could transform the way that we engage with the world.
My aim as an artist is to provide a set of lenses to look at the world in a diferent way.
I’m personally tired of saying, ‘put yourself in my shoes’ so I would rather say ‘put these
Fa‘afafabulous glasses on and be ready to see a whole new world!’

References
Bucknell, B. (1993) “On ‘Seeing’ Salome.” ELH 60, no. 2, pp. 503–526. [Link]/stable/2873388
[Accessed 17 May 2022].
Cole, T. (2019) “When the camera was a weapon of imperialism (and when it still is)”. The New York
Times Magazine, February 6, [Link]/2019/02/06/magazine/when-the-camera-was-a-weapon-
[Link]?smid=url-share [Accessed 17 May 2022].
Fry, G. (2019) The ‘South Seas’ in the imperial imagination. In Framing the Islands: Power and Diplomatic
Agency in Pacifc Regionalism, pp. 43–60. Canberra: ANU Press. [Link]/stable/j.ctvt6rjbw.8
Kihara, Y. (2022) “What is a fa‘afafne”. [Link] [Accessed 29 May 2022].
Lugones, M. (2007) “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System.” Hypatia 22, no. 1,
pp. 186–209. [Link]/stable/4640051 [Accessed 17 May 2022].
Manfredi, C. (2018) Robert Louis Stevenson’s Pacifc Impressions: Photography and Travel Writing, Cham: Pal-
grave Macmillan.
McMullin, D. and Kihara, Y. (2018) Samoan Queer Lives, Auckland: Little Island Press.
Quanchi, M. (2020) “Researching Early Photography of the Pacifc Islands: An Overview”. Journal of New
Zealand & Pacifc Studies 8, no. 2, pp. 269–281.
Treagus, M. and Syes, M. (2017) “Looking Back at Samoa: History, Memory and the Figure of Mourning
in Yuki Kihara’s Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” Asian Diasporic Visual
Cultures and The Americas 3, no. 1–2, pp. 86–108.

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Notes
1 Dan Taulapapa McMullin notes that the term Fa‘afafne was used until recently to encompass all queer
LGBT Samoana people (McMullin and Kihara 2018).
2 Max Quanchi notes that early photography overlaps with modern flm, theatre and advertising, so it is
not a defned period. It is considered a longer era that is specifc to each island and atoll.

2.3 PARTICIPATORY PHOTOGRAPHY

Gaze, Representation and Agency
Michelle Bogre
Participatory photography may be the genre of the 21st century. It originated as a research
method termed photovoice, primarily for the health education/public health sector to engage
people in using photography combined with grassroots social action to represent themselves
and tell their own stories (Wang and Burris 1997; Harper 1998). Photovoice theory incorpo-
rated Paolo Freire’s ideas of using photographs and drawings to foster critical analysis of social
problems and collective action (Freire 2020) and feminist and queer theory that explicitly elicits
women’s and queer perspectives and advocates that research participants be actors rather than
objects of study (Wang 1999). Photographers, particularly documentary photographs – the sub-
ject of this essay – have adapted participatory photography not as a research method per se but
as a practice to subvert hierarchical relationships between photographer and subject and to give
photographed persons more agency in how they are represented.

History
The photographer–subject relationship wasn’t always so hierarchical. Imagine a day in 1840.
Louis Daguerre has invented the daguerreotype, a process to create a unique image on a pol-
ished silver coated piece of copper plate. An upper-class women is having her daguerreotype
made. She must sit still for 5 to 30 minutes. To ensure she sits unmoving, the photographer has
probably placed her head in a head brace, an apparatus that uses two fork-like prongs to hold
the head still. This process clearly involves consent and collaboration. Most importantly, she will
be given the unique daguerreotype, so she also will control its use.
Even as photographic technology and materials improved, photography still remained essen-
tially collaborative, if not somewhat participatory, until the early 20th century. It is almost
impossible for a photographer using a bulky 8- by 10-inch or 4- by 5-inch view camera on a
tripod to surreptitiously photograph someone. The power between photographer and subject
shifted, and modern photography changed forever, with the invention of roll flm in 1889 and
the small hand-held camera in 1925 when the Leica 1A was sold to the public. (Koetzle 2015:
544) Photographers, no longer tethered to a tripod, were free to become visual predators. Even
the language of the practice shifted. Shoot. Capture. Subject.
New theories of documentary photography developed, and in the United States, emerging
ideas and changes in copyright law vested all control of the image in the photographer. The
photographer roamed the world making photographs with no responsibility or accountability
to whom or what was photographed. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, photographers
exploited increasingly powerful digital camera technology such as long lenses and sensors with
very high sensitivity to light that allowed them to photograph in previously unavailable cir-
cumstances that mitigated the need for consent because often people did not know they were

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being photographed. Consider the extreme example of Irish photographer Richard Mosse’s
project, Heat Map, which won the 2017 Prix Pictet prize (Prix Pictet 2021). Mosse used a
modifed military weapons-grade camera that produces images by detecting thermal radiation
from a distance as far away as 18 miles to photograph refugee camps in Europe, North Africa
and the Middle East. Admittedly he did modify the camera so facial features were undetectable
in the images, and each fnal image was constructed of hundreds of frames, but almost none of
the people in his photographs consented, or knew they were being photographed.
Current practice-based participatory photographic projects are a response to the general idea
that community based photography allows people to control how they are seen, potentially
counteracting stereotypes; how photographers can mediate the participant’s frst-hand experi-
ence and viewer’s reaction; and a couple of decades of scholarship and criticism highlighting
documentary photography’s problematic relationship with its subject and challenging assump-
tions about photographic representation and authorship (Rosler 1989, 2006; Solomon-Godeau
1994; Sontag 1979, 1985).

Shifing Balance of Power

The criticism of documentary photography is not without merit. If we consider photography
more accurately as a social activity and a means of communication, then all photography involves
some unspoken collaboration between photographer and subject and photograph and viewer,
so why should the photographer control the photography? (Palmer 2020: 15). All photographs
are relational because they are all the “product of an encounter” . . . between a photographer,
a photographed subject and a camera and that encounter transforms the photograph “into a
document that is not the creation of an individual and can never belong to any one person or
narrative exclusively” (Azoulay 2008: 13). Photography is a complex medium because it is a
paradox: object and idea, reality and representation, truth and fction, objective and subjective,
fxed and foating. It is indexical (Peirce 1992) but susceptible to shifting interpretations because
the meaning of an image fuctuates with context and viewer. The paradoxical nature or shifting
meaning of images is not so problematic when photographs are of inanimate objects, but when
the photograph involves persons, particularly marginalized persons, the dynamic changes. Just as
the victor writes the history, the documentary photographer creates the visual narrative, which
can marginalize, glorify, objectify or treat dispassionately persons being photographed because the
photographer wields a power of social construction over who or what is represented and what
the representation is. We rightly now question whether the photographer should continue to be
the lone actor who determines the meaning of a photographic encounter because “no one can
commit photography alone” (McLuhan 2013: 243). We also scrutinize contemporary photo-
graphic practices with a post-colonial mindset given that documentary photography has a long
history of being a (mostly) white male Western gaze on (often) non-white or non-Western people.
Drawing from Freire’s ideas of the oppressor and the oppressed and that in the process of
oppression, someone oppresses someone else (2020) – substitute photographer and subject – we
also now consider how complicit photography has been in “othering” photographed persons
and reinforcing the Western belief of moral superiority. We might ask, rightly so, whether the
Indian prostitutes in the brothels on Falkland Road in Bombay, India, legitimately consented
to being photographed or even understood what story photojournalist Mary Ellen Mark was
telling and what she would do with the photographs she made of them in sometimes very com-
promising situations (Mark 2005).
In response to the withering criticism and probing questions, documentary photographers
have searched for new narrative forms. Among the new narrative approaches that have emerged

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are multi-year projects, some extending 20 years, that suggest a closer subject/photographer
relationship from the very length of the project (Constantine (2015, 2021; Kashi 2021); refec-
tive projects where the photographer or photographer’s friends and family are photographed,
negating accusations of exploitation and authenticity (Billingham 1996; Clark 1971, 1983; For-
ster 2021; Goldin 1986; Sultan 1992); and inviting photographed persons to intervene by using
their own words on or near the image or writing directly on images (Goldberg 1985a, 1985b;
Wolin 1997).
Photographers have created various types of collaborative and participatory projects to ame-
liorate concerns about photographer/subject power imbalances, to amplify voices of margin-
alized groups whose narratives have not been self-defned, to give people agency in defning
how they are represented and to repatriate and share ownership and authorship of a photograph
with the persons photographed. They hold themselves more accountable to the people they
photograph and have a heightened awareness that all photography is a collaborative face-to-face
encounter between the photographer and the photographed person. From award-winning
renowned documentary photographer Ed Kashi, in an interview with the author, “I approach
things now . . . with a greater awareness of the implications of what . . . I’m creating.”
While the modern idea of sole authorship is conceptually problematic, pre-internet, it was
less practically problematic because, as photographic distribution was limited, so was the impact
of the photograph. In the age of social media, photography has become an extremely powerful
technology with often unintended consequences. Most photographs taken now never remain
in the past; rather they interact with and are transformed in the present. In our 21st-century
digital world, an image can be uploaded to someone’s social media feed, immediately “liked”
and tagged at various times during the day and points on the network – trending on Twitter
or TikTok, shared and remixed into various palimpsests on Instagram – and by the evening re-
emerge as part of a diverse and varied conversation that may have no connection to the original
photograph, its context or the intended narrative. Photography also has become a 21st-century
panopticon (Foucault 1995). On a typical day in a major city such as New York, a person will
be photographed (surveilled) more than 200 times by city-owned surveillance cameras or by
citizens with cameras (Weiss 2004: 19). With billions of images posted online daily, social media
has a broad and impenetrable reach; once posted, an image is almost impossible to remove, for
example, if the original account holder dies or disappears. The concerns about what constitutes
informed consent and who should control representation are rightly amplifed in our digital age.

Types of Participatory Photography Projects

It is important to note that even though participatory photographic projects have proliferated
in the 21st century, the practice has roots in the Worker Photography Movement (WPM) that
started in Germany in the late 1920s and spread across Europe to the United States, central
America and beyond (Ribalta 2011). In Germany it was tied to Willi Müzenberg’s socialist pub-
lishing empire and his call for amateur and working class photographers to submit images to his
newspaper, the Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Workers’ Illustrated News), at its peak the second-most-
read periodical in Germany. The WPM sought to turn amateur photographers into photojour-
nalists able to supply the leftist press with pictures revealing working-class life and depictions of
proletarian working conditions and everyday life struggles from a Marxist viewpoint that were
not being taken by traditional bourgeois photojournalists. As with participatory photographic
practices, class politics was at core of the worker photography movement.
Before participatory photography was a methodology, left-leaning photographers engaged in
participatory ways with the people they photographed. For example, in the late 1980s, Chilean

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photographer Paz Errázuriz collaborated with the trans communities when LGBT activities were
still stigmatized and criminalized under the dictator Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (Errázuriz 2021).
She worked for fve years on the project, titled Adam’s Apple, photographing cross-dressing
male prostitutes in brothels in Santiago and Talca, photographing what mainstream Chilean
society viewed as anomalous and forbidden. She spent long periods of time with the men,
building their trust, evident in the intimacy of her images. They reveal varied moments, moods,
activities and places in the brothel where the male prostitutes mask and unmask their emotions,
desires and sometimes fear and where they cross over conventional gender roles in displaying
their sexual preferences. Although Errázuriz took the photographs and retained ownership of
them, it is clear from the theatrical, performative and sometimes seductive nature of the images
that the trans people actively participated in being photographed.
Other non-Western early participatory projects include Los Talleres de Fotografa Social
(TAFOS), an early landmark socially engaged photography project in Lima and Cuzco, Peru
(Fairey 2020). Under the direction of Thomas Müller, the project provided photographic equip-
ment (fully automatic Yashica T3s or Nikon L35-Afs) and conducted more than 30 workshops
with communities in eight districts around Peru. The 270 community photographers were taught
photographic basics such as framing, light and how to change flm and were asked to document
their reality at a time when their communities were rife with political violence, extreme poverty
and lack of political representativeness. As with subsequent participatory projects, the TAFOS
photography was regarded as collective labor, not an individualistic and singular experience. The
photographers developed their own flm, and together the photographers and Müller reviewed
the contact sheets and selected the images. Over the 12-year period, TAFOS photographers shot
more than 4200 rolls of flm, producing more than 150,000 images making visible the invisible
and creating an important historical archive that revealed the transformation of Peru in that time.
In the United States, the earliest participatory photography practitioners often worked with
children. These practitioners include Jim Hubbard, who worked with, and gave cameras to,
homeless children in Washington DC (1991); Wendy Ewald, who has worked on various par-
ticipatory photography projects for 40 years, beginning in 1975 when she founded the Moun-
tain Photography Workshop with children in Appalachia, Kentucky (2020); and Zana Briski,
who produced a book and Academy Award–nominated movie, Born Into Brothels (2005). Bris-
ki’s 10-year participatory photography project began in 1997 when she went to Calcutta, India,
to photograph prostitutes in Sonagachi, the largest red-light district. where she found children
living in the brothels. Profoundly afected, she returned to Calcutta and ofered to teach the
prostitutes’ children the basics of photography so they could document their lives. The result-
ing photographs were extraordinary (Briski 2005). The kids’ images are amazing as documents,
artifacts and art. Some images are impressionistic – a naked light bulb swarmed by bugs seek-
ing warmth, a close-up of a child’s face, a blurry image of a woman undressing. Others appear
almost professional, such as a portrait of young girl standing slightly of center in a blue dress the
same color as the blue background but set of by the complementary green of her head scarf.
A similar project “Through the Eyes of Children,” founded by photographer David Jiranek,
involved teaching photography at the Imbabazi Orphanage in Kigali, Rwanda, to children
orphaned by the 1994 Rwandan genocide against the Tutsi. (Through the Eyes of Children
2021) The NGO conducted workshops for 11 years with the same group of 19 children, now
known as “Camera Kids.” This project is evidence of how efective participatory photography
can be. The photographs were shown in international venues, including the United Nations,
and the majority of the children went to university, sponsored by supporters of the NGO. Three
of the original camera kids, Jean “Bizi” Bizimana, Gadi Habumugisha and Mussa Uwitonze,
are now professional photographers and also work as project coordinators teaching photography

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to other children. As a team, their project, “Humanity Lost, Humanity Found: 25 Years after
Rwanda’s Genocide,” was also shortlisted for the 2019 Visionary Award from the Tim Hether-
ington Trust. In an interview with the author, Bizi said: “Without a camera we’re just like other
kids, but the camera gave us authority and reasons to connect to other people. We could paint
a new picture about Rwanda after the genocide.”
Bufalo-based photojournalist Brendan Bannon’s frst foray into participatory photography
also involved children. He wanted to give refugee children the tools to reframe their narrative, so
he collaborated with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to run
workshops for children in refugee camps in Yemen, Namibia, Lebanon and Jordan (the Za’atari
camp), where he had taught photography to Syrian refugees. Bannon’s workshops were intense:
students attended eight hours a day, six days a week, for two weeks. Bannon gave each child a
sketchbook and an inexpensive Fuji Fx1 digital point-and-shoot camera. They were expected to
complete fve or six assignments, some of which were abstract. For example, to break down pre-
conceptions of what a portrait is, Bannon assigned them to shoot a “faceless” photo. The students
responded with images incorporating gesture, shadow, refections or extreme cropping. A life of
displacement can be bleak, but their images were not. Their images pulsated with wisdom, humor
and joy. In addition to making the photographs, the students wrote about their images because
Bannon believes that text amplifes and articulates the meaning of the image (Bogre 2019). The
project, Do You See What I See, exhibited at UN headquarters and featured in an exhibition, Inse-
curities, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, was so successful that Bannon created
a nonproft organization to continue collaborative work in marginalized communities worldwide.
A diferent type of participatory project that shifts almost all of the power to the participants
was launched by French photographer JR when he won the $1 million TED prize in 2011 (JR
2017). JR created “Inside Out,” an ambitious global art project focused less on the creation of
work than getting the stories out into the community. To that end, groups could send in por-
traits of at least 50 people to the Inside Out studio in France, where the images are printed as
approximately 3- by 5-foot posters and mailed back to the group organizer. To date, approxi-
mately 415,938 people have contributed portraits from 138 countries. The groups are asked
to photograph the fnal installations, which have included “The Story Behind Our Wrinkles,”
where young people in Bogotá, Columbia, walked in the streets, carrying the portraits of older
people; “We Still Exist” in North Dakota, where the Lakota and Dakota nation attached their
portraits to the sides of their tipis on the Standing Rock and Pineridge Native American res-
ervations; and “Women are Heroes,” both in Morro da Providencia, the oldest favela in Rio de
Janiero, and in the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya, in which organizers pasted close-up images
of women’s eyes or full portraits on the shanty walls and rooftops, respectively (JR 2021).
Australian photographer Robin Hammond also shifted much of the power to participants
in his “1000 Dreams” project. He wanted to change the prevailing narratives about refugees,
so he raised money to conduct workshops and provide equipment to 40 refugee storytellers
across Europe (2021). As does JR, he functions as a facilitator and mentor, not a photographer.
The goal is for the refugee storytellers to photograph and interview 1000 refugees. Hammond’s
team edits, translates as needed and posts the photographs and stories on the 1000 Dreams Project
website. Hammond mentors the photographers throughout the process. Although Hammond
controls distribution – currently on the 1000 Dreams website and some planned exhibitions –
the refugee storytellers are the primary benefciaries of any monies made from sales, print and
exhibition fees. “1000 Dreams” is what Hammond refers to as a “narrative change project”
designed to amplify the voices of marginalized groups so they can contribute to how they are
defned. He wants to shift the toxic narratives that refugees are either a threat or a burden to
society and Western culture or that they are hopeless, helpless victims. In an interview with the

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author, Hammond said, “By doing 1000 stories we want to get people to embrace the massive
diversity of refugee experiences, as told by refugees in their own words.”
Anthony Luvera, an Australian socially engaged artist who lives in the United Kingdom,
turned to participatory photography projects in 2002 to “address the power (im)balance”
between artists and the people they represent (Burbridge and Luvera 2019: 353). He had been
invited by a charity that dealt with people experiencing homelessness to photograph their
annual shelter Christmas event. Luvera felt acutely uncomfortable with this idea, so he declined
the invitation. A few months later, he was able to access about 20,000 GBP worth of disposable
cameras, so he approached the charity with the idea of setting up weekly sessions to teach pho-
tography. The sessions were successful. After a couple of years, Luvera also had an opportunity
to exhibit the photographs as part of a public art project for the London Underground. He
realized that rather than just showing their photographs, showing the people themselves would
be a more efective way to counter stereotypes, so he created “Assisted Self Portrait” as a way to
shift the narrative power to the people experiencing homelessness. After some experimenting
and then support from a camera store, Luvera taught the participants photography on a flm-
based 4-by-5 view camera with a Polaroid back, and later with a digital medium format camera,
which facilitated the learning process. Over repeated sessions and in places signifcant to the
individual, he taught them how to use the equipment.
Both Hammond’s and Luvera’s approaches confront one weakness of most participatory
photography projects: the quality and aesthetic of the fnal image. Luvera functions as an assis-
tant for each actual portrait session, but the participant is fully in charge of the photograph. In
the resulting (usually) well-composed and high-quality images, the participants present them-
selves as they want to be represented. Luvera is interested in how “involving participants as
contributors to the processes of representation can inscribe a diferent, more nuanced view, or
otherwise complicate commonly held perceptions” (Burbridge and Luvera, 2019: 353). This
project not only shifts the idea of gaze and representation because the photographed persons
are both in front of and behind the camera, but, acting as the assistant, Luvera also interrogates
the idea of art as reciprocal creative labor (Kester 2011: 7). After the images are made, however,
the power shifts back to Luvera, who manages the project. He organizes community projects
and talks and facilitates the image distribution as publications and exhibitions. Cognizant of the
power imbalance that can occur after images are made even in participatory projects, he seeks
paid opportunities such as public talks for the participants.

Conclusion
Participatory photography projects disturb certain hierarchies inherent in the production of
images. They shift some narrative power to the photographed person, whether the project
involves people photographing their environments or making self-portraits. However, as a
methodology it does not, and cannot, address the lack of control over the meaning of the
photograph, which, as noted previously, is even more fuid in a digital environment. Unless
control of the images – editing and distribution – is shared or shifted and unless the creator of
the image retains ownership, some hierarchy is reintroduced at the level of dissemination and
image consumption.

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2.4 CANTERBURY, REVISITED

Reflections on a Collaborative Photography Course for Sighted and Visually
Impaired Participants
Simon Hayhoe, Partho Bhowmick, Noemí Peña Sánchez, and Karl Bentley

Introduction
How can photography education for people with visual impairment evolve to become more
inclusive? This chapter addresses this question by discussing the design and evaluation of a pho-
tography course in Canterbury, UK, using inclusive andragogical methods, that is, methods of
teaching adult students, which aimed to support visually impaired and sighted students working
collaboratively to share their experiences of imagery. The students participating in the course
had varied experiences of photography, had different forms and levels of physical impairment
and none, and came from the United Kingdom and Germany. Three of the students were
from Kent, the county where Canterbury is located, which was important to the educational
aims of the project, as it was intended to conjoin the international experience of the teaching
being developed with an experience of often-unseen aspects of the local environment. Impor-
tantly, this chapter also discusses how autonomous learning experiences through the production
of photographic imagery can stimulate further self-directed learning and self-confidence and
motivate future image making.
The inspiration for the course was the development of a collective of international photog-
raphy educationalists and students, along the same lines as previous tuition of adult and school-
aged students during a customised fine art and photography course and a course designed to
support students with diverse access needs (Bhowmick 2015; Peña Sánchez 2014, 2015; Hayhoe
2013). Similarly, the main educational aims of the course were to investigate cost-effective alter-
natives to expensive, traditional assistive photography and educational technologies to examine
the development of soft skills using mobile technologies and to explore the most effective way
of providing training in the use of these devices for photography.
The primary aim of the discussion of the course that follows is to contribute to the debate
on art and aesthetic education for people with visual impairments through the experiential
learning of photography and two-dimensional images as a means of developing cultural agency
and inclusion. Unfortunately, there has been scant investigation of this issue and its relevance
to a general understanding of the role of image-making experiences of people with visual
impairments, yet such a debate can inform inclusion in the education of visual culture, a notion
stipulated in international laws with a focus on cultural inclusion (Hayhoe 2015a). The second-
ary aim of this article is to contribute to a broader debate on the nature of the visual arts, art
education, and visual culture, as the following discussion questions the idea that learning about
such concepts is premised primarily on visual perceptions alone (Hayhoe 2020). The follow-
ing chapter is divided into the following sections: an outlining of photography by people with
visual impairments, a discussion of findings from the evaluation, and the conclusions drawn
from the course.

The Context of Photography and Visual Impairment

To develop the aesthetic foundations of the course at Canterbury, the context and nature of aes-
thetics and photography by people with visual impairment was examined, and a critical analysis
of the philosophies that provided its foundation was conducted. In this initial examination, it

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was observed that the received wisdom of philosophers of the enlightenment and much of the
20th century was that perception contains purely visual concepts that are increasingly unavail-
able given decreasing levels of sight. This traditional argument has theorised that people with
visual impairments having no vision, or at least such little vision as to be unworkable, will never
experience visual aesthetics and are thus unable to understand the work of the sighted (Hayhoe
2020). It has been argued that the reason for this theorisation of visual impairment is complex
but mainly relates to an understanding of blindness as an abstract intellectual idea, rationalised
and greatly reduced to an oversimplifed concept by academics and institutions to make intel-
lectual functioning easier or to support broader social and cultural prejudices. Thus, it is argued
that much of what was felt to be common sense by much of our world was a prejudice based
on the lack of thought and ability of academics and those who led our cultural development,
which has led to the passive exclusion of people from institutions such as museums, galleries,
and websites (Hayhoe 2017).
Despite these perceived barriers, in the early years of the 21st century, photography by visu-
ally impaired artists rapidly developed new genres in the feld of contemporary art based on
the unique qualities of tone, texture, and the subjects of these photographs. Furthermore, the
notion that a completely blind person wanting to create an image of what they experienced
through touch, taste, sound, or smell and project it on a fat visual image that can be shared
with friends, family, or peers or publicly exhibited was slowly beginning to be understood
(Barry 2006). This also provided a signifcant recognition of what the mind can experience
cognitively, whatever its level of sensory input, and of what can be imagined or communicated
given divergent perceptions and comprehensions of aesthetics, images, and art education. Over
time, it appeared that three genres of photograph provided illustrations of aesthetic and intel-
lectual forms of the work of visually impaired artists: the genre of tonal photography, the genre
of vibrant colour photography, and the genre of raw image photography (Bhowmick 2015).

Te Tree Genres of Photography by Visually Impaired Artists

The tonal photography genre was observable in the black-and-white studio and landscape port-
folios being developed by visually impaired artists working largely focusing on portraiture or
still objects, an example of which is much of the work produced by the New York–based Seeing
with Photography Collective (2022). What few viewers realised was that many people with visual
impairments see only in tones of black and white, known medically as achromatism; thus, what
the chromatic viewer, that is, the viewer who sees in colour, can get most from this groups’
photography is a sense of extreme depth in the necessary tones used in these artists’ imagery.
This is an experience that is often unusual for those who see the world primarily in full colour,
where these tonal qualities are often masked.
Earlier educational research through the observation of a young female student with achro-
matism, that is, total colour blindness, studying for an A Level in Art at a school for the blind
in Worcester, in the British Midlands, has shown that the process of this representation of tonal
diference can be used as a tool of learning about the textural qualities of the body and the envi-
ronment frst hand (Hayhoe 2008). During this study it was observed that the student’s artworks
refected a diferent aesthetic character through her perception of the bodies and landscapes that
went against what had previously been described in educational theories on visual impairment
(Hayhoe 2015a).
For instance, it was observable that the student saw better in a dark room lit by infra-red light
than many sighted people did whilst using similar equipment. This was a discovery that motivated
the student to work on diferent forms of image development in the darkroom and to experiment

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with the diferent qualities of the representations of textures represented in her images. Further-
more, the student also found that because she could not see in what is traditionally thought of
as colour, her experience of the shading of images was more defned, detailed, and richer. This
greater understanding of shade and tone was ultimately based on the practical reliance of living in
a world without the extra dimension of colour, like a gardener who relies on diferent aspects of
the weather to become more aware of the diferences in clouds or wind directions.
The neurology behind this genre of photography was best illustrated through a study of a
colony of achromatic people on the tiny and remote Pacifc atoll of Pingelap, who saw the local
landscape better than the sighted population as the sun set (Sacks 1998). Through this experi-
ence, the perception of tone was far more intense for achromatic members of the community,
making the experience of tonal contrast far more important to the navigation of their immedi-
ate environment and the perceptions of objects within it. Similarly, extreme contrasts between
light and shade were immediately apparent in many of the black-and-white images seen in the
collections of the visually impaired collectives that produce the images of this genre when seen
in low intensity or single-coloured light, although it should also be noted that the diferent use
of shade was also noticeable in a number of the colour photographs by the artists in these col-
lections when they worked in this medium. Consequently, the artists were again experiencing
colour purely as tone and therefore saw more enriched qualities than the subtle variations that
people who were chromatic.
The genre of artwork pertaining to vibrant colour photography provides alternative forms of
aesthetic information and what could be described by chromatic viewers as a robust colour expe-
rience. This experience was a factor that of the utmost importance to people who were visually
impaired but who had limited amounts of vision and were chromatic (Hayhoe 2008). Many
of the artists who produced images in this genre were often more reliant on the simplicity and
contrast of the colour of the images they produced to provide perceptual information beyond
that required by the more understated colour images preferred by people higher levels of vision.
Consequently, the strength of vibrant colours needed to be more intense when creating and
developing the photograph to amplify what little vision the artist had left. Therefore, this need
for vivacity became a quirk of a diferent experience of rich and varied sensorial experience,
where colour diference was hard to determine, and images created in the vibrant colour genre
were more likely to illustrate what it is like to have what is felt to be compromised vision in a
diferent way.
The psychology of diferent comprehensions of colour that underpins this genre was high-
lighted during observations made during previous research with those viewing and creating
multi-sensory fne artworks in a collaborative school-museum project. During these observa-
tions it was found that a mixed group of visually impaired and sighted school children were
taken around the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, UK, to fnd artworks that they could
reproduce, each emphasising the non-visual senses as much as they did vision (Hayhoe 2013).
During the museum course, it was observed that collaborating students from a mainstream
school and a school for the blind were initially shown around a museum by a guide who
assumed that the visually impaired students would only want to know about texturally rich
pieces. However, after the tour the students from the school for the blind visited the glass gal-
lery where, despite everything being untouchable, the pieces were very delicate and constructed
of brightly coloured glass. Eventually, two of the three favoured pieces chosen by the students
during the project were chosen from this collection.
Examples of artworks by artists with low vision and that featured an intensity of colour were
shown at the California Museum of Photography in 2009 in an exhibition entitled Sight Unseen
(McCulloh 2009) and were evident in the collections Blind with Camera (2022) in India and

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Blind Photographers in the United States (Estrin 2009). In these broad portfolios of imagery, there
was a distinct juxtaposition between the dark backgrounds, the combination of strong colours,
and those in which light colour is used to stand out from the darkness, providing a distortion
of the images’ subjects. Examples of the latter are particularly visible in the works of Kanchan
Pamnani and Pranav Lal (Blind with Camera 2022), with pictures mirroring the distortion of
light perception by someone with particular forms of visual impairment. This is also seen to
be applied most efectively in Blind with Camera’s Painting with Light series, in which the dark
background is set against moving lights funnelled through a camera on night mode.
The body of work representing the raw image genre is often produced during educational
tasks involving novice photographers with visual impairments, each of whom is given a simple
camera without adjustable parts and asked to take pictures of diferent elements of their eve-
ryday lives. One of the frst examples of this form of education began in San Francisco with
a school project pioneered in 2002 by Tony Deifell (2007), which has since been replicated
by many schools and educational institutions worldwide, such as PhotoVoice’s examination of
what it is like to be a visually impaired person (2022).
This genre, it was felt, stood apart from the previous two, as its process transformed the
photographer into a narrator of the social issues and inequalities that they faced in their daily
lives. Photographers working in this genre also tended not to use expensive cameras or equip-
ment set up by trained technicians, whose images were designed for high-profle exhibitions
or commissions. Instead, these images were generally produced with inexpensive or disposable
cameras which took simple images that refected the scenes and everyday lives of their users,
making their images an anthropological study of their day-to-day existence, in the style of the
sociological methodology for which the project PhotoVoice is named (Mitchell 2011).
For those working within the raw image genre, photography seemed to become less a matter
of the cognitive diference between visual impairment and sight than a social narrative about
the excluded reality of the camera user. To put it another way, artworks in this genre took the
viewer not only into the cultural aesthetics of the photographer but also into the social environ-
ment of the circumstances that their impairment prescribed and that these artists live within. An
example of work in this genre is Blind with Camera’s series on the life of Rahul Shirsat, a totally
blind student of the project who had previously seen and had a visual imagination. His work was
guided by his hearing, a sense that fred his visual imagination to understand the scenes around
him that included images of staircases and students at his school for the blind sitting on highly
polished foors, the experience of his local underpass and the vibrating sound of concrete steps
through his legs and cane (Blind with Camera 2022).

Founding an Andragogy on Tese Observations

What was learnt during the analysis of all three genres was that the process of creating an image
is not just of educational use to students who are visually impaired but is also intellectually,
physically, and socially illuminating to students with sight. It was this element that was in part
refected in the projects of Blind with Camera and their college of photography, which was spe-
cifcally founded for the education of students with visual impairments. The images that were
collected during this project showed radically diferent worlds of institutionalisation and school
friends that are rarely photographed, contrasting insides with hotter, lighter outsides or scenes
that can only be communicated through a feeting moment. Thus, an idea of inclusion through
collaborative work was formed.
Perhaps what was also most educationally signifcant about the images in the compositions
and ideas projected throughout these genres, however, is the participants’ lesser regard for what

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have been thought to be the formal rules of composition or subject choices. This disregard for
formal methods, it was felt, made less technical or formal approaches to photography a creative
vehicle for developing inclusive practice, where no presuppositions were to be placed on the
student and no external judgements made. It was with this notion that a four-day collaborative
course based at Canterbury Christ Church University (CCCU) was developed in partnership
with Canterbury Cathedral and a local contemporary art gallery, Turner Contemporary in
Margate, in 2015.

Te Canterbury Photography Course

The andragogical model used to develop the four-day course at Canterbury was largely informed
by a model of inclusive technical capital (Hayhoe 2015b), as it largely refected the educational
aims of the course. However, this model did little to inform the aesthetic or andragogical aims
of the process being undertaken. Thus, during this course and in a later museum-based project
a model of inclusive capital was developed, which was founded in large part on the notion that
learning can be interpreted as an accumulation of abstract capitals that are used to develop fur-
ther learning, autonomous learning, and inclusion (Hayhoe 2019).
Andragogically, inclusive capital was to be developed through the andragogy itself, the cam-
eras used, and the environments and subjects of the photographs. In the application of the model,
it was found that access to inclusive capital and technical capital was best developed through
accessible regular cameras in devices like smartphones and tablet computers. This development
freed the learning activities to concentrate on the environment of photography alone and the
shared aesthetics of the students. This environmental understanding of image creation focused
primarily on the mechanical aspects of capturing an image, the relationship between light and
the functions of cameras, and what photographic processes could explore in relation to the
social experience of visual impairment and full vision. Thus, exercises were designed to include
subjects and topics that would allow all students to collaborate on experiences of familiar objects
or topics. The exercises were also designed to help the participants explore local Kentish envi-
ronments which were less familiar, exploring issues such as mobility and an understanding of
diferent social, cultural, and geographical surroundings through image making.
The teaching and collaborative work on the course was designed to encourage soft skills
through the development of photographic skills and an understanding of students’ experience
of objects and environments and to test the use of mainstream inclusive technologies in edu-
cational and real-life environments. This work was also designed to encourage a process of
thinking about the experiences with diferent forms of disabilities or none and others’ difering
learning needs as inclusive technologies, that is, mainstream technologies designed to include
all users. This andragogy contrasted with more traditional separate art courses for people with
visual impairments and assistive technologies, that is, technologies designed specifcally for peo-
ple with physical and learning disabilities that considered the learning practices of people with
visual impairments fundamentally diferent to those with sight.
The four-day course was designed with the following tasks. On the frst day students were
introduced to the technology and the diferent history and culture of traditional photography
which had been taught in mainstream colleges and museums and taught how to upload and
share their work, the strategies of exhibiting work, and the development of simple images
through collaborative educational tasks. The task was formulated according to principles of uni-
versal design for learning to instruct participants (Katz and Sokal 2016), and participants initially
worked in pairs to support each other developing images on their own devices. These images
were then verbally described, encouraging visually impaired and sighted students to share the

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development of this description and thus encode their experiences in a form that could be
understood by the broadest possible audience. During the demonstration, students were also
asked to work on their own mobile devices and prepare images that could potentially be shared
using live social media.
The initial task consisted of taking pictures of learning partners and verbally describing the
image or what they thought the image looked like without showing it to their learning part-
ners. Following this frst task, students took images of their own faces close up; images of their
partner’s legs and arms from a distance; images of their owns arms and legs close up – these were
to focus on a feature, such as a fnger, hand, painted toe, or foot; images of something on their
body close up, such as a ring, necklace or tattoo; and an image of a body part on their or their
partner that they would not normally see, such as their own back, their heel, or their nose from
beneath. As with the portraits, after each image was captured, the students worked with their
partners on a description of these images.
The purpose of these tasks was to allow the students to collaboratively focus on a self-image
of their own body in a way they would not normally see it whether they had sight or not and
that they did not really take much notice of on a daily basis; parts of the body that others rarely
see of them in order to refect on their own body image; and items they had chosen to add to
their own bodies for aesthetic purposes but rarely focused on. Taking images of other students’
bodies from a distance also allowed the students to explore the concepts of distance beyond their
own reach. This concept moreover explored the nature of far-of and nearby imagery and the
principle of foreshortening, that is, the sight of items in the foreground appearing to be larger
than items in the background.
The subsequent three days of the course were spent applying this initial training and then
reviewing an initial portfolio of work in various inclusive environments. On the second day the
students collaborated on a photo-narrative of the life of Canterbury Cathedral and its surround-
ings. This exercise was designed to provide an example of a local heritage environment that
explored the history of the area close to the university and included sharing images and verbal
descriptions of these images amongst each other. On the third day of the course the teachers,
students, and support staf travelled by train to conduct a photo-narrative of the life of Margate
beach and sea front, based at Turner Contemporary, and an examination of a number of photo-
graphs, the gallery and seafront as a backdrop. This exercise was designed to act as a contrast to
the previous day’s heritage environment and allowed the students to experience one of the most
colourful and vibrant environments in Kent on a summer’s day.
On the fourth and fnal day of the course, the students returned to the classroom to discuss
their experiences of the tasks undertaken over the previous three days, to discuss the develop-
ment of their portfolios for exhibition, and to evaluate the course. This fnal day’s debriefng
was designed to allow the students to discuss each other’s work in more detail and choose
each other’s favourite photographs from the course before considering how they would like to
develop their experiences through autonomous learning.

Analysis of the Observations Made During the Course

The analysis of data from gathered through observations and data gathered after the Canterbury
course raised two signifcant issues for further investigation and that could be used to improve
future task development. The frst issue was that the previous experience of students afected their
use and appreciation of the tablet computers used during the exercises, with the second issue being
that the diferent experiences and backgrounds during collaboration made the group work richer,
and many social soft skills were developed through cooperative learning with the tablet computers.

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On the frst issue, the main observation was that the experience of the participants was not
related to their visual impairment or blindness. One of the students who was visually impaired
had no experience of photography prior to the course, but four of the other visually impaired
students had their own high-end, technically sophisticated cameras and had studied photogra-
phy for years. One of the visually impaired students was also taking a bachelor’s degree in pho-
tography at the time of the course, whilst another was working as a professional photographer.
Subsequently, the ubiquitous mainstream technologies which were the initial focus of the
course, such as smartphone cameras and tablet computer cameras, were of limited use to these
seasoned visually impaired photographers. However, these simpler technologies did prove the
most popular form of camera for with those students who had little experience of photography,
both visually impaired and sighted, who often used smart devices for other activities, although
their size sometimes proved difcult. As one student with little experience of photography
classes and a visual impairment stated, “I use an iPhone, so I was familiar with [tablet comput-
ers]. . . . My [tablet] was a bit heavy. . . . Sometimes I was a bit afraid I’d drop it.” Another
inexperienced sighted student with a physical disability stated,

I found the [tablet] that I was loaned a marvellous piece of equipment. It is very user
friendly. . . . I had never used [a tablet] for photography before. I found it under-
standable and practical to use and fun. And as it was light I found the handling of it
manageable as well.

By contrast, although all four experienced veterans undertook initial training on using the iPad’s
accessible features, they preferred to use their own equipment during the activities or a combi-
nation of both iPads and their own equipment. However, they also saw a position for the iPad
with less experienced students, both blind and sighted. For example, Photo Booth allowed one
blind veteran to see handwriting for the frst time since becoming blind decades previously, as it
reversed the colour of a handwritten page and writing. Furthermore, the professional photog-
rapher also taught photography to others who were visually impaired, and after attending the
course emailed the following,

I have encouraged several people to use a tablets for photography as we had a photo
week and a couple members [who] really struggle with cameras so they used a tablet all
week. . . . I then did a presentation at a conference on photography were I also showed
tablets and I have another member now using a tablet.

On the second issue, students found it useful to use the iPad as a collective social tool, discuss-
ing their experiences as they went along and comparing images with others, with the zoom
functions and the larger screens on tablet computers proving particularly useful. It was found
that the students also stayed in touch after the course, and conversations were sent on months
afterwards, which encouraged further autonomous photography exercises by students who had
previously had little or no experience of photography. During the course, it was also seen that
the inexperienced students found it useful to share techniques and became more socially and
technically confdent. This was particularly important for the older students, who felt that they
were more vulnerable to social and cultural isolation. One single older participant even brought
jars of jam on the fnal day of the course, as a thank you to others she had worked with.
Observations of the course also provided an opportunity to discuss and experience access in
numerous ways, providing a potentially diferent form of soft skill. In particular, the students
worked within a physically mixed community, and students with all levels of vision often had

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other physical disabilities and thus had to adapt to a diferent way of learning, working, and
communicating. This experience was refected in a number of the quotes from the evalua-
tion. For example, one sighted participant with a physical disability stated, “The teaching was
interesting, thought provoking and stimulating. The tour was fabulous. Interesting, visually, and
orally. A most informative and enjoyable experience.” Similarly, one of the visually impaired
students with a physical disability later wrote stating,

[The discussion] gave a useful introduction to technology and the history of photog-
raphy. It provided me with a theoretical background and helped me to fnd motives
and inspirations for my pictures. I enjoyed talking to other participants and looking at
their pictures. Everyone was very nice and the accommodation of people with difer-
ent disabilities worked very well.

Conclusion
At the beginning of this chapter, we asked the following question: How can photography
education for people with visual impairment evolve to become more inclusive? During the
Canterbury course, we demonstrated how andragogy involving collaborative tasks by students
with visual impairments and sight had the potential to develop inclusion, motivate autonomous
learning, and increase an understanding of visual impairment and sightedness. Moreover, par-
ticipants using mainstream technologies successfully learnt with and from each other, produced
images collaboratively, and remained connected afterwards no matter their level of education or
previous experiences of photography.
This andragogical experiment has therefore not only led to the development of technical
and aesthetic soft skills; it has also stimulated novel, valuable experiences of what is traditionally
felt to be a purely unattainable visual culture for people with visual impairments. What efects
these inclusive skills will have on future educational development is to be established, as a single
course only provides limited fndings. Thus, a new critical methodology and further studies
now need to be developed to assess the signifcance of collaboration on inclusive photography
education.

Acknowledgments
We acknowledge CCCU, Canterbury Cathedral, and Turner Contemporary for hosting the
course. We would also like to acknowledge CCCU’s Inclusion, Equalities & Social Justice/
Curriculum: Creativity & Innovation theme groups for funding the course and Blind Veterans
for funding some participants.

References
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Deifell, T. (2007) Seeing beyond sight: Photographs by blind teenagers. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books.
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Hayhoe, S. (2013) A Practice Report of Students from a School for the Blind Leading Groups of Younger
Mainstream Students in Visiting a Museum and Making Multi-Modal Artworks. Journal of Blind-
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January 2022].
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Seeing with Photography Collective. (2022) [Link] [Accessed 24
January 2022].

2.5 SOCIAL PRACTICE AND PHOTOGRAPHY

Who Is Looking at Whom?
Tifany Fairey, Julian Germain and Mark Strandquist in Conversation
With Anthony Luvera
The following text is an edited transcription of ‘Who’s Looking at Whom?’, an event held on
18 June 2021, chaired by Anthony Luvera for the online talks programme Beyond Magnum.
Julian Germain, Tifany Fairey, and Mark Strandquist were each invited to give a short presen-
tation, which was followed by a brief discussion. The event was part of Chapter II: On Repre-
sentation and Self-Representation, curated by Anthony Luvera and Noelle Flores-Théard, and
is available to view on Magnum’s YouTube channel.

ANTHONY LUVERA (AL): In recent years, there has been a surge of photographic practices and
projects described using terms such as collaborative, participatory, and community. In these
ways of working, the artist creates or co-creates socially engaged photography, collaborative
photography, socially engaged art, or uses photography as a social practice. As new as these
types of photographic practices may sometimes seem, socially engaged photography can be
seen to have arisen in relation to the work of individuals and collectives in the community
photography movement of the 1970s and ’80s in the United Kingdom (Luvera 2019);
the Worker Photography movement of the 1920s and’30s in Germany and the Soviet
Union (Ribalta 2011); critiques of documentary photography (Rosler 1999); conceptual

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art’s de-materialization of the object (Lippard 1973); as well as the longstanding practices
of collaborative artists such as Wendy Ewald, Suzanne Lacy, Judy Harrison, Loraine Leeson
and Peter Dunn – just to name a few.
This conversation brings together three individuals who, I believe, have made a sig-
nifcant contribution to the feld of socially engaged photography today. What is at stake
in their work is the way each artist redefnes their role as a photographer, proposing a
recalibration of the power dynamic between the artist and the subject of their work, and,
in doing so, has an impact beyond the gallery system. Indeed, in a socially engaged prac-
tice, the word ‘subject’ is often withdrawn altogether and the term ‘participant’ is used to
describe the individuals, groups of people, and communities involved in co-producing the
work. So, if socially engaged photography is made with and about the people taking part,
we might ask, who is looking at whom? How are issues of power, agency, representation,
authorship, ethics, and consent addressed?
I’d like to begin by inviting Julian Germain to speak about the work he has made along-
side the artists Patricia Azevedo and Murilo Godoy. Since 1995, they have collaborated on
a number of projects including one made with a favela community in Belo Horizonte, Bra-
zil. Proceeds from the resulting book, No Mundo Maravilhoso Do Futebol (Germain 1998),
fnanced the construction of a library and community center. Another project, No Olho da
Rua, brought imagery made by marginalized groups of people living on the street directly
into public view in the form of posters, newspapers, and fyers displayed and distributed on
the streets of the Belo Horizonte.
JULIAN GERMAIN (JG): I met Patricia and her partner Murilo in 1994, and we just knew we
wanted to work together. We started working in the Cascalho favela which ran a women’s
football team and children’s teams. In previous projects I’d developed a working process
that included collecting found imagery, but our idea was not to collect but to generate
photography by giving out cameras, especially to the children, and asking them to make
the pictures themselves. At that time, we weren’t aware of other projects of this kind and
I don’t think we really did this for conceptual reasons. We did it because it seemed to be an
interesting way of gathering material.
There were about 50 kids and about 15 young women from the football team involved.
For us, it rapidly became a very exciting experience, as they started to produce images we
couldn’t possibly have expected that were aesthetically beautiful, as well as somehow ft-
ting in with the theme of the kid’s own love of the game. Of course, the reality of life in
the favela also comes through in the pictures. It was also interesting that they clearly set
up and theatrically arranged pictures. They had ideas and then brought them to fruition
successfully.
The following year, we went back and we decided to make paintings, partly because we
didn’t then have the money to use photography. A year later, in order to produce a book,
we felt we needed text. So, initially, the kids would go and ask the oldest person they knew
in the favela about the favela’s history. They’d come back with perhaps just a couple of lines,
which was cut and pasted into a collective text, which gradually grew, developed, and was
embellished over several weeks. Because the work was about football, we were able to sell
the images to various magazines. With the money we raised, we made the book, No Mundo
Maravilhoso Do Futebol (Germain et al. 1998), and built the library and community centre.
We also started to work with street kids on a project called No Olho da Rua. We knew
of a couple of locations where they hung out, so we just went and met them. We gave
cameras to three diferent gangs, about 50 people in total. Just as in Cascalho, the par-
ticipants immediately produced pictures we found inspiring. We generally knew who was

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responsible for the camera, at other times a camera might belong to a group, but we real-
ised very often we didn’t know who had made which picture. Then, in the group sessions,
when we met up with them on the street, we began to understand that it wasn’t important
to them who took the picture. What mattered, to them, was who was in it. They had a
very diferent idea of authorship.
It took a long time for us to think of an outcome for this work. It was complicated to
fnd a way forward that would be appropriate and that they could all agree to, because,
apart from anything else, there were three diferent gangs. We came up with the idea of fy-
posters that would be glued to the walls, one and a half meters by a meter in size. Patricia,
Murilo and I did a frst edit with pictures we were interested in, for example, an image of
a can of thinner that the kids would soak in a rag and snif, but they didn’t want this to be
a poster. Equally, they didn’t want to be recognizable or have their faces on the posters. At
this frst stage, the only image that was acceptable was one of Haidé, who was pregnant and
wanted to be shown (Figure 2.15). As we began to better understand their sensitivities and
limits, we were able, over several sessions, to make a satisfactory selection they agreed with.
We have continued with the project over the years, occasionally going back with cam-
eras and meeting them again and again. We have accumulated a large archive, including a
series of damaged prints, which we literally found on the street, abandoned or lost by the
participants as they move from place to place: a refection of how difcult it is for them
to hold on to possessions. Over the years, the drug culture changed from thinner to crack
(Figure 2.16). In 2007, we made a newspaper to be distributed on the street. This gave
the kids a fantastic opportunity to meet the public and for the public to meet them in a
diferent context.
Nowadays, we are thinking more and more about the archive. One of the reasons we’re
doing a series of zines is to help us get the archive properly organized. We think it’s inter-
esting to give guest editors the opportunity to look at the archive and interpret it in their
own way. Our intention is for the participants to engage with this editing process too, but
with the COVID situation it has not been possible to organize thus far.
AL: Thank you very much, Julian. I’m now going to ask Mark Strandquist to join us. Mark has
spent over a decade using art to amplify, celebrate, and power social justice movements.
The immersive exhibitions, interactive photo based public arts, and multimedia projects
he directs have helped advocates close a youth prison, pass laws, train police ofcers, and
connect the dreams and demands of communities impacted by the criminal justice system
with tens of thousands of people.
MARK STRANDQUIST (MS): I want to talk about a couple of long-term projects as well as some
very short-term ones, to showcase a variety of collaborative strategies and practices I use in my
work. Photography and art are not just powerful tools for showcasing the problems of society,
but for imagining and articulating ways forward and illustrating alternatives to systemic issues.
Performing Statistics is based in Richmond, Virginia, where I work with young folks who
are currently locked up in juvenile detention facilities. The entire project is about looking
to young folks as experts and using a variety of photographic, flm, and public art strate-
gies to amplify their dreams and their demands for a better world. Throughout our work,
if we’re making a flm, they are the directors, the writers, the story-boarders, the actors,
and we are connecting them with a variety of artists to amplify their voices. Images can be
transformed into posters, T-shirts, billboards, and banners, enabling the young folk to see
how powerful their voices can be in all these diferent mediums.
I think about photography as a series of stages: design, production, and distribution.
Each of those stages has a ton of opportunities to bring folks together to have them see

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Figure 2.15 Otacilio and Haidé Film, Image of Haidé, 1995. From No Olho da Rua, 1995–2022, by people
living on the streets of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Patricia Azevedo, Julian Germain and
Murilo Godoy.

how powerful they can be, and to reach broad and strategic audiences. If the young folk
in my projects are vulnerable and brave enough to share their stories, how do we ensure
their work gets out to the right people and actually has a deep impact? We’ve used our

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Figure 2.16 A4 photocopy (with comments) used for fy poster editorial meetings, 1997. Station Group
Collective Film 1995, Image of “Minas Gerais” paint thinner. From No Olho da Rua, 1995–
2022, by people living on the streets of Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Patricia Azevedo, Julian
Germain and Murilo Godoy.

exhibitions to train hundreds of police ofcers, social workers, teachers, and politicians.
One strategy we use to avoid only reaching the self-selecting audiences of traditional art
spaces, is to bring the art to political spaces, printing hundreds of T-shirts for parades and
protests, literally creating people-powered art exhibitions that use the art as tools for ampli-
fying their dreams of abolishing these unjust systems.
Recently, during COVID, we have created a couple of public art projects that use art
and technology to imagine a world without prisons. For our project, Freedom Constellations,
in Richmond, VA, we made a mural with youth advocates that has augmented reality and
QR codes baked into the walls. You use your phone to hear directly from the young folks
whose larger-than-life portraits look out across the city. The mural is directly across the street
from the Virginian Commonwealth University Police station in Richmond, which means
that every single day they look out their windows and see powerful young leaders who are
literally dreaming to put them out of business. Alongside this mural, the Freedom Constel-
lations project includes a digital web experiences ([Link]/experience),
a poster campaign and a Richmond city bus wrapped with poetry and portraits of youth
advocates fghting to end youth incarceration.
We’re about to launch an installation that includes two 170-foot-tall banners installed on
the side of the Richmond City Hall that will be seen from miles away (Figure 2.17). When
you hold a phone up to their photographs, the phone will play augmented reality anima-
tions in the clouds over City Hall of youth reading their poetry and dreaming of a world
where all youth are free (Figure 2.18). In Richmond, especially, where we’ve had such a

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Figure 2.17 Freedom Constellations: Dreaming of a World Where All Youth Are Free, a project by Perform-
ing Statistics in collaboration with Rise for Youth, Invisible Thread and the Department of
Human Services.
Two 160 × 80-ft banners cover the sides of Richmond’s City Hall. The banners feature two
local youth activists, Ta’Dreama McBride and Clyde Walker, and include augmented reality
animations that play in the clouds above city hall through viewer’s phones.
Source: Image courtesy of Departure Point Films.

complicated, toxic, and racist history of public art and monuments, we’re able to start to
replace racist monuments with the kinds of monuments the city needs the most: monu-
ments that include the voices of young folks dreaming of a world without youth prisons.
Likewise, for another project I co-direct, the People’s Paper Co-op, we worked with women
who, as children, were sentenced to life in prison. We created a monument at the Village
of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia that dreams of, and imagines, the day that
all of the women who are still locked up are free. It’s interactive, with QR codes, and you
can hear each of the women describe their dreams and their visions. These projects require
deep partnership, deep trust. For me, what’s most important is who is in the room when
we are frst starting and how we are building collaborative teams that are trauma informed,
co-led by peers, and not extracting stories and then calling it collaborative.
AL: Mark, that was an inspiring overview of what I know is just the tip of the iceberg in your
collaborative practice with many diferent participants, community stakeholders, and part-
ners. Thank you very much. I’d now like to invite Tifany Fairey to join us. Tifany Fairey
is a visual sociologist, and for 20 years she has worked with participatory photography and
media as a researcher, practitioner, and educator.

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Figure 2.18 Augmented Reality Still From Freedom Constellations: Dreaming of a World Where All Youth Are
Free, a project by Performing Statistics in collaboration with Rise for Youth, Invisible Thread
and the Department of Human Services. For the project, augmented reality animations of
youth poetry and portraits play in the clouds above City Hall through viewer’s phones. Image
courtesy of Invisible Thread.

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 Social Practice and Photography

TIFFANY FAIREY (TF): My current research looks at the critical and neglected relationship
between photography and peace-building. The research is considering the role that images
and image-making can play in building peace and dialogue in societies with recent histories
of violence and confict. I’m specifcally looking at how socially engaged, participatory,
and dialogical community photography practices have been harnessed with the intention
to support healing, rebuilding, and reconciliation of communities and people who’ve been
afected by violence. I’ve been working with various photographers and organizations in
a number of countries who do this kind of work, building case studies, and undertaking
action research on photography projects and initiatives that can be understood and desig-
nated as forms of peace photography.
The history of photojournalism and documentary photography has been defned by
iconic images of war. These images splinter all of our imaginations to remind and educate
us on the horrors of violence and confict. We celebrate the work of the great war pho-
tographers. There are exhibitions, books, flms, and volumes of research that focus on war
photography. The critical literature has extensively considered photography’s fxation and
even collusion with confict, sufering, and atrocity. Photojournalism assigns priority to
representations of confict rather than peace. More often than not, peace in documentary
photography is understood negatively, as an absence of violence, and is referenced by focus-
ing on the legacies of sufering victims. The problem with this approach is that it tends
to strip the people depicted of agency, designating them as victims. By only representing
peace through the prism of war, photography contributes to the invisibility of peace. It
reinforces the idea that confict and violence are inevitable.
Peace photography, in contrast to war photography, doesn’t exist as a concept in the
professional discourse on images, but in recent years, a number of thinkers, including Frank
Möller (2019) and Fred Ritchin (2013), have pushed us to consider the question of what a
photography of peace might consist of. I’m interested in contributing to this new agenda
for visual peace research. A more concerted efort to explore the relationship between
photography and peace feels particularly urgent, given the extent to which political spaces
are constructed by means of images which are often harnessed to fuel division. A genre of
Peace Photography doesn’t yet exist, but it needs to be willed into existence. Participatory
photography practices that seek to enable confict afected communities to become the
agents of their own images and to tell the stories that are important to them as they recover,
rebuild, and cultivate peace, I propose, are a vital component of what peace photography
consists of.
In Rwanda, I’ve been working with Jacques Nkinzingabo, the director of the Kigali
Center for Photography. His community photography and photo mentoring work oper-
ates as a model for visual peace-building. In The Home Stay Exhibitions, young photog-
raphers who’ve been participating in Nkinzingabo’s photo workshops and mentoring
programs, host exhibitions in their homes. This is in a context where, since the geno-
cide in Rwanda, many families have closed their doors to neighbours. Perpetrators and
bystanders are often living side by side, and they have endeavoured and often succeeded to
reconcile, but also struggle to rebuild trust. These exhibitions seek to open the doors and
use photography to share stories and start conversations on issues that young people deem
as important to Rwanda’s present and future. One of the young photographers, Delfn, has
been working on a project that he has titled Masculinity and Family (Figure 2.19). With his
pictures, he wants to share and celebrate how men work hard to support their children,
what men can do when they’re not consumed with being macho, but rather focused on
building their families.

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Figure 2.19 Masculinity and Family, photographer Delfn Mugisha.

In considering these projects, I’m often reminded of the Wim Wenders quote, “The
most political decision you can make is where you direct people’s eyes” (1997). When
people are charged with the camera, they get to set the parameters of the story. They get
to choose where to direct people’s eyes and to defne the conversations that are important.
From within Rwanda, there is a call for the country to be known for something other
than the genocide. Young Rwandans have many pressing concerns that relate not only to
remembering and learning from the country’s past, but also to its future. It is not about the
images themselves, but rather what the images do, the conversations they can start. A focus
on the process of making images, on the doing of photography, over the image products
themselves are a defning characteristic of many forms of peace photography. The focus is
not so much about representing peace, but about using the process of images and image-
making, to shape and nurture it.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Post-Confict Research Center (PCRC) is a peace-
building organization led by a former journalist, Velma Šarić, which intentionally harnesses
creative multimedia and storytelling to cultivate an environment for sustainable peace. Since
the war, ethnic divisions in Bosnia remain high. Various versions of history exist and the
past is a highly-contested platform. Youth are particularly vulnerable in this environment
and PCRC projects seek to counter what they see as key barriers to durable peace. Namely,
an excessively polarizing and negative media that reinforces division, a defcit of positive
Bosnian role models, and a prevalence of social infuences that ingrain and perpetuate neg-
ative perceptions and attitudes towards others. They do this by creating projects that foster
tolerance, moral courage, and change. They create professionally-produced documentaries
and public photography exhibitions, as well as provide training and mentoring to young
Bosnians to create their own media and stories that are disseminated through exhibitions,
publications such as a youth culture magazine, and the online platform Balkan Diskurs.
Over the last seven years, they have been nurturing and growing a countrywide network
of youth correspondents and photographers who are producing a raft of social stories that

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Figure 2.20 The Love Tales: Zlatica and Muhamed Kljuno.

Source: Photography: Armin Durgut/Interview: Azra Berbić with support from Post Confict Research Centre
[Link]/en/projects/the-love-tales/.

provide viewpoints on culture and politics not found in mainstream media. This brief pres-
entation can’t do justice to the wide body of visual work the PCRC has been involved in
producing, but I want to highlight one recent project.
The Love Tales (Figure 2.20) tells the stories of couples from across Bosnia and Herzego-
vina who are in successful inter-ethnic relationships. Much like PCRC’s fagship program,
Ordinary Heroes, which uncovers the stories of ordinary Bosnians from all ethnic groups
who risk their lives to save people from ethnic groups that weren’t their own during the
war, The Love Tales seeks to challenge ingrained narratives that real connections between
Bosnia’s ethnic groups are unattainable. The images and interviews are undertaken by
PCRC’s youth correspondents. They actively seek out stories from their communities that
contribute to a more inclusive and shared understanding of their country’s past and future.
PCRC’s work lies in mentoring and building the capacity of young Bosnian change
makers, providing them with the skills and networks to create and share their own stories.
Stories that counter the persistent narratives that young people grow up with in school
and through the media, one-sided accounts of history, division, and violence in which
other ethnic groups are vilifed and confict appears almost inevitable. The idea is to
inspire that peace is possible and the importance of this cannot be underestimated when
many young Bosnians have become desolate and cynical, struggling to build lives in a
country with one of the world’s highest rates of youth unemployment, rife corruption
and a crumbling economy.
Even long after the guns have been put down, peace might not seem like a reality for
many. These young people are willing into existence a vision of their country that disrupts
and counters the dominant narratives of division, suspicion, and mistrust. Photography isn’t
only about what is seen, but also about what goes unseen. This pushes photography beyond
its representational function. Images and encounters through images that seek to drive and

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nurture dialogue and build opportunities for connection are generative. They help to make
the world they seek to create.
There has been an important critical debate about the ethics and manipulation of par-
ticipatory photography initiatives that points to the fne lines between modes of collabo-
ration, exploitation, and co-optation, suggesting it’s often the organizers rather than the
participants who drive and beneft from these initiatives. However, this work must not be
dismissed. We cannot lose sight of the fundamental importance of what’s in play when
people get to self-represent, to decide where to direct the cameras, and to defne what is
worth looking at. If we do, we’re in danger of missing the huge peace potentiality that
photography holds.
AL: Thank you very much, Tifany. Your research into these projects provides a rich addition to
our discussion. Mark, you once said that one of the things you want is for young people to
fall in love with the power of their own voice. This is such an evocative intention. Tifany,
at a certain point, you have said this work is about so much more than photography. In
many ways, both of these statements neatly sum up the point of this event, which is to think
through the ways in which photographic practices can enable more than image-making
and play a role in impacting the lives of individuals, creating change in the real world.
Having said this, it seems to me, there can be a tension in socially engaged practices
between the process of making the work, how this process is described, and how the
images, artifacts, or products created through the process are shown to audiences. In this
respect, the role of documentation in a socially-engaged practice is particularly impor-
tant. In describing process, I can’t help but be aware of the fact that any description will
be reductive to some degree and won’t be able to fully account for the layers of dialogue
involved, the many contributions by all individuals involved in making the work, or the
tensions and challenges encountered along the way.
Mark, can you speak about how you’ve enabled the participants you work with to rep-
resent their experience of the making of the work?
MS: A lot comes from the larger documentation of the project. In previous exhibitions we’ve
worked with young folks in the criminal justice system to create the content. When people
come there, they’re not just the docents, they’re the guards, but they’ve created these new
uniforms that are all about freeing youth, they’re leading you through the process and liter-
ally shifting the power dynamic within that experience. I really believe that the process is
deeply political and that as artists we need to be transparent about process. We need to share
our failures, our struggles, and the beautiful moments that happen. It’s hard with funders
because being vulnerable and being truthful makes it complicated, but it’s needed.
AL: I’m curious about the parameters of a project when it is designed by an artist, prompted by
a commissioner or an opportunity to access a particular piece of funding, and how this can
involve participants. Too often the formulation of a project, in its earliest stages, doesn’t
involve participants.
JG: With the street kids, we went “of piste”. The initial situation was totally chaotic. Essen-
tially, we gave out cameras with no idea of what was going to happen. We just had this
feeling they would enjoy photography and they might see it as an opportunity. We weren’t
thinking of an outcome at all. We were just basically trying something out.
MS: In the case of our workshops, we have a structure to them, but they’re very open. Another
example would be a flm we are doing for an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Art and
Industry Museum, and the only concept we have put in place is that we want to make a
flm about a future where no youth are locked up. How we get from that initial prompt to
the end is completely open to the young folks.

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TF: I think the idea of strategy is really key in these projects, as the visual is being employed
for the purpose of other things. In Mark’s case, he’s talking about ending youth incarcera-
tion, in Julian’s case about street kids. In the projects I am looking at, it’s very much about
supporting a community to rebuild, to talk with each other, and to make connections and
embed peace. Of course, organizers and participants are going to work together to do this
and harness aesthetics in doing so. The organizer or a mentor might bring in some of their
visual knowledge to support and work with communities, but I don’t fnd this problematic
so long as the communities want this and they’re actively making decisions themselves.
It’s only when these projects become ventriloquism, when it’s essentially the organizers,
the artists, or the NGOs behind the project using communities as puppets. That’s when
it’s problematic.
AL: Absolutely. It seems to me that one of the dangers in a socially engaged practice is commu-
nicating to audiences who weren’t involved in the making of the work. The lines between
what the artist intends the work to do, what it actually achieves, and how it was experi-
enced by participants, can often be vastly diferent.

References
Germain, J., Azevedo, P., Godoy, M. (1998) No Mundo Maravilhoso Do Futebol, Amsterdam: Basalt Publishers.
Lippard, L. (1973) Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972, New York: Praeger.
Luvera, A. (2019) Photography for Whom? London: Photography for Whom?
Möller, F. (2019) Peace Photography, Rethinking Peace and Confict Studies, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ribalta, J. (2011) The Worker-Photography Movement 1926–1939, Madrid: TF Editores.
Ritchin, F. (2013) Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary and the Citizen, New York: Aperture.
Rosler, M. (1999) “Post-Documentary, Post-Photography?” In Decoys and Disruptions: Selected Writings,
1975–2001, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wenders, W. (1997) The Act of Seeing: Essays and Conversations, London: Faber and Faber.

2.6 THE BREATH OF MEMORY

Danie Mellor in Conversation With Tyson Yunkaporta

Remembering and Revelation

As a child, images of my great-great-grandmother Ellen (Figure 2.21) captivated and intrigued
me. In the silver gelatin photographs of our family archive, the earliest of which date from about
1908, the portraits of Gran Ellen and her daughter May (my great-grandmother) sing through
time and space. I saw beautiful, soulful black women, a mother and child involuntarily caught
as many were at the time in a monumental, turbulent, and life-changing spiderweb of events.
They ignited a sense of connection and resonant memory.
Those pictures and their haunting materiality burned themselves into my mind, a signifed
and signifer potent enough that even at a young age, I understood in an emotionally abstract
way they were more than just old photographs of my great-grandmothers. I saw them as pic-
tures somehow symbolic of the world and, more recently, an important part of global remem-
bering and revelation. They show a poignant sense of human vulnerability during a period in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of social and cultural transformation, in which
Aboriginal people were forced to contend with the imposition of unfamiliar values and an alien
matrix of language, expectation, and custom.

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 Danie Mellor in Conversation With Tyson Yunkaporta

Figure 2.21 A Gaze Still Dark (A Black Portrait of Intimacy), 2019. Wax pastel, wash with oil pigment,
watercolor and pencil on paper, 178 × 117.5 cm.
Source: Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Narrm/Melbourne. Collection: National Gallery of Australia.

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 Te Breath of Memory

A young Aboriginal woman, a transfguration. Beautifully haunting, the image draws close
reference to a portrait of my great-great-grandmother Ellen from early last century in Cairns.
Taken by the late-colonial photographer Alfred Atkinson, the original silver gelatin print forms
part of a unique and extensive photographic archive of our family. While the picture is person-
ally important, it also serves as a potent signifer and signifed of the time. A summary of an age
of transformative experience in Cairns and Queensland, the image also belongs symbolically to
monumental changes in our country and more expansively and poetically, the world; it echoes
Susan Sontag’s observation that photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly
magical. A memento mori image, this powerful but gently observed portrait is a carte de visite,
a brief glimpse into the world of Ellen: the photograph seeks our gaze even as she returns it and,
again in the words of Sontag, incites us to reverie.
My maternal Aboriginal heritage is from the rainforest people of the Atherton Tablelands
region in Northern Queensland and with settler ancestry is inextricably connected with the
history of that area. Interwoven with the experiences and stories of my recent Indigenous
ancestors were their photographic portraits and carte de visite images that were passed down
through my mother’s family. Portraits of several generations of our family were taken by the
photographer Alfred Atkinson in his Cairns studio, commissioned regularly over many years.
His practice and oeuvre included such portraits, as well as landscapes and images of Aboriginal
people in the rainforest, the latter often used for postcards that were fashionable at the time
(Figure 2.22). I work with images selected from Atkinson’s archive, incorporating photographs
taken by him with those I have taken myself. I also use his imagery on occasion as source mate-
rial in my paintings. His photographs were taken in the region my family came from and lived
in for tens of thousands of years, and I approach their use with a degree of prudence; it is a
complex history to navigate.

Figure 2.22 (a) My great-great-grandmother Ellen Kelly and (b) my great-grandmother May Kelly pho-
tographed by Alfred Atkinson ca.1908 in Gimuy/Cairns, Queensland.
Source: Credit: Family Collection © Danie Mellor, 2021.

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 Danie Mellor in Conversation With Tyson Yunkaporta

Many Aboriginal subjects of historical photographs are anonymous, and while some have
names of people recorded, the majority do not. They are extant in those reproductions, though,
and should be remembered, as they were among many who faced turbulent waves of recent
history. In this strand of my work, historical images are typically combined with infrared photo-
graphs I have taken in the rainforest. The fusing of recent and archival imagery emblematically
collapses time, showing the lush and verdant landscape as an Indigenous space: a place saturated
with human presence and story from which family came. It is a conceptually rich approach,
creating a pathway into the archive of a photographer who had efectively documented my fam-
ily and people in that area for so many years.
Atkinson’s studio images were an area of research for my PhD, along with that of other late-
colonial photographers, although my dissertation focused more broadly on the implications of
historic photography of Aboriginal people rather than images of my family made by him. It was
evident in my studies that any archive of historical images ofered an array of possibilities in their
reading and were connected, even if lightly so, with other collections around the world. Picto-
rial and photographic archives from lands with colonial histories often reveal a claimant gaze
that is intensely curious and simultaneously dominant. They show worlds of industry, strug-
gle, triumph, adaptation, and survival. It is worth noting a narrative that is partially obscured,
although present, is the loss and catastrophic change experienced by Indigenous people of those
places. Each empty landscape, settler’s hut, agricultural or mining scene, railway, or store-lined
main street of freshly minted towns shows the unintended pictorial evidence of hidden brutality
and colonial taking. Photographic images from the late colonial era are bound to settler power.
The gentle, often profound violence in the activity of looking at quixotically other people and
things – in this case past – is a well-founded and explored element of post-colonial theory.

From Nobody’s Land to Everywhen

One of the intentions in my photographs that combine recent and archival imagery is to exor-
cise the shadows of terra nullius or ‘nobody’s land’, a declaration made under international law in
1750 by which the Eastern seaboard of Australia was claimed for the British Crown. The legal
fction of terra nullius was eventually overturned in 1992 (Mabo 1992), but scars and trauma
remain because of the dispossession and disenfranchisement experienced by Indigenous people.
Acknowledging and privileging the presence of people is a means by which to expunge the
silence surrounding the tide and consequences of colonisation, or, as the academic and anthro-
pologist WEH Stanner called it, ‘the great Australian silence’ (Stanner 1974). Another central
tenet of that combination in my work is to convey ancestral presence and the notion of ‘every-
when’. This hints at the reality of a timeless moment in which past, present, and future simul-
taneously unfold in a continuous wave. Stanner coined the term everywhen in his 1958 essay
‘The Dreaming’ (2011). ‘Dreaming’ is a word that describes a state of perpetual creation and
relates to stories and legends of creation that are considered timeless. In Aboriginal culture it is
a dynamic refection on and response to the creative power of the cosmos and ancestral beings
and is recounted through oral histories, legend, dance, song, and art. It is also the overarching
body of memory and knowledge itself, encapsulated and conceptualised in all these forms and
inseparable from life, because it is life.
A ruinous corollary of colonial invasion for so many Aboriginal people was the interrup-
tion and loss of connection to ancestral land and Dreaming stories. With traditional language
and dialects discouraged and, in many instances, actively forbidden from being spoken, the
dismemberment of cultural practice and relationship to place was inevitable for many groups of
people. My current work re-proposes those connections and refects on the complexity of the

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 Te Breath of Memory

photograph and its imaging power; through their assembly they assert continuing and perpetual
custodianship and life.

Disclosure and Revelation

One of my favourite observations by Sontag in On Photography is ‘the painter constructs, the
photographer discloses’. I am keenly aware the essays in the book were frst published between
1973 and 1977, so her refections were based in an evaluation of analogue process. Digital
technology lends itself to construction as much as disclosure and as an artist who both paints
and takes photographs, I fnd the two are less separate now than in the past. It is a poetic obser-
vation, though, and the idea is compelling: disclosure suggests a veil of secrecy is somehow
being lifted.
Disclosure and revelation are important elements in many of my photographic images and
not something I consciously evoke, although the imagery often yields lucid glimpses into a hid-
den world. In Landstory, a monumental nine-panel piece (Figure 2.23), I reimagine the scene as
a ‘landspace’, efectively proposing another way to read the conceptual and natural ecology of
the landscape. Considering the world as a landspace suggests we are in an enveloping environ-
ment, a world as Stanner implies with past, present, and future – its land story – unfurling as
concurrent phenomena. The temporal compression suggested through the merging of imagery
brings past and present together and indicates the continuing presence of Aboriginal people:
linear time is dissembled by the act looking. It is a timeless land story, providing a contemporary

Figure 2.23 Danie Mellor, Landstory, 2018. Diasec mounted chromogenic prints on metallic photo-
graphic paper, 9 panels, each 224 × 124 cm, overall 224 × 1276 cm.
Source: Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Narrm/Melbourne. Installation view Tolarno Galleries by
Andrew Curtis. Collection: National Gallery of Australia, Kamberri/Canberra and Fondation Opale, Switzerland.

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 Danie Mellor in Conversation With Tyson Yunkaporta

revision of what once was and as such, the work ofers a supra-normal experience of landscape
in its evocation of ancestral apparition.
The combination of infrared and archival imagery allows the immaterial to become visible,
the spectral fgures suggesting we are being introduced to an already occupied space. The Per-
spex face-mounted presentation brings viewers through their refection into the lush imagery
of each panel as if by chance; it models the reader as a dynamic part of the composition and
is a considered strategy of inclusion. Showing the work without a frame allows an uninter-
rupted relationship with the environment and space around it, while the images are printed
on metallic photographic papers, the surface reminiscent of silvery wet and humid rainforest
environments.
Stories of Place and A World of Ideas (Figure 2.24) recall the interconnection between vast
and unfolding cosmic realities and cat’s cradle or string games: the microcosmic refects the
macrocosm, the infnite manifesting itself in our day-to-day pursuits. The woven form of the
twine and its pattern is symbolic of a spider web-like diagram of creation on a grand scale, a
Dreaming space and subtle association with string theory and quantum gravity. This ‘theory
of everything’ suggests all of reality being held interdependently together as part of a holistic
framework, which echoes and afrms a structural awareness inherent to Indigenous knowledge
systems. The relationship between the surrounding ecological space, shown though the spectra

Figure 2.24 Danie Mellor (a) Stories of Place, 2020 and (b) A World of Ideas, 2020. Chromogenic prints on
metallic photographic paper, each 180 × 108 cm.
Source: Courtesy the artist and Tolarno Galleries, Narrm/Melbourne.

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 Te Breath of Memory

of infra-red and ghostly images by Atkinson, emphasises an empowered and sustained connec-
tion to environment and place through all of time.
My understanding of the rainforest environment has come about through close friendships
with elders and time spent in that environment on long walks into remote areas over the years.
I came to realise that each time a journey or feld trip, however short, was planned, I would
have prescient dreams that were like an echo of the places we would visit and move through.
After coming back from a walk or trek, expansive and vivid dreams would continue for days
afterwards, efectively bookending an experience that was both liminal and acutely demanding
in the most physical way.
The rainforest is at times so hot and humid it feels as though boundaries between body, self,
and the surrounding ecology are blurred and made indistinct. Heat and moisture literally bufet
the senses like invisible and amorphous shapes. These walks feel like an infrared experience in
themselves, as if there is a kinaesthetic echo between one’s body, camera sensor, and the tem-
perature range it is registering with each photograph taken. When I visit the rainforest now, it is
more frequently alone. Walking into isolated areas, climbing the sides of mountains strewn with
boulders, or pushing waist-deep through rushing mountain creeks stirs a sense of being vitally
alive. The experience doesn’t make the photographs I have taken any better or more resolved,
but each image feels permeated with the journey.
I am sometimes asked about the historical focus of my work. The photographic pieces I cre-
ate are more about a particular historical moment or, to be precise, a sequence of moments. The
dynamics of change and the way it was documented and recorded underpins and is a driving
fascination for my research.

A Conversation With Tyson Yunkaporta

To provide further insight into ideas around time and temporality, I invited my friend and col-
league Tyson Yunkaporta to join the conversation. Tyson is a leading scholar and researcher of
Indigenous knowledges, and what follows is the transcription of our exchange.
[21 September 2021, Bowral, New South Wales on Gundungurra Country and Melbourne,
Victoria on Boon Wurrung Country]

DANIE MELLOR: Tyson, we’ve often talked over the years about photography and how that
enables a translation of the ‘deep history’ of time and space.
TYSON YUNKAPORTA: An important thing to mention frst is that in most Aboriginal lan-
guages in Australia, we don’t have separate words for time and space. So those concepts are
merged, which may seem strange to a Western lens on the world. We are both working in
diferent ways at the edge of things by translating concepts of time and place.
DM: We are, and something we can talk about in relation to that is resonant memory and how
that translates into a perception around the passage time in the present. One of the ways you
have framed that is by talking about its shape. I have often thought about how we assemble
an understanding of those layers of history. It’s recognising that temporality provides a rich
tapestry of insight and perception into history and relationships between people.
TY: You can’t engage memory without engaging a theory of time. And that is also a theory
of place and space. (In our culture) you’re not just sharing a memory with things that are
familiar to you, because that would be a form of entropy. Remembering for us is closely
connected with objects, you know, in which we store memory and have memory.
DM: It’s a model of haptic memory based in feeling, but also consciousness. I fnd it particularly
fascinating how we receive memories from the ‘past’ in our present day and make sense of

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them through relationship. This becomes interesting when considering relationships with
photographic images, particularly those from the archive. It recalls the classic museological
tradition of creating and curating the archive, although there is a connection with other
cultural traditions in the act of creating a ‘physical’ memory.
TY: And that’s a record that must not be touched must not be altered, must not be changed.
DM: But it has its own value . . .
TY: Is that the same as living (cultural) knowledge, though?
DM: No, it isn’t. You and I would approach an archive as something that holds living memory;
it’s like an incredible well of experience and story retold through image and object.
TY: And that’s lovely. You’re working with images in a particular way and it’s an abstract space
where you are turning the tangible things of this world into a metaphor and working in a
place of spirit with an abstract basis of thought. You aren’t necessarily working in that space
of imagination and spirit, you are working in the tangible with abstracts, so you’re making
spirit real right here with an image. You have a haptic relation to it and working with your
camera when it comes to the landscape of your grandmother’s country.
DM: What brings it alive for me in the sense I think you’re talking about, is the close encounter
and engagement with the physical reality of the rainforest. It’s almost as though the act of
walking in that environment brings those images alive: they are embedded in the whole
journey. It can be an overwhelming experience because it is achingly beautiful but at the
same time has an edge of danger.
TY: Tight cycles in the now of time, but then also deep cycles, whereby you physically bring
that haptic relation of archival ancestral images into that place.
DM: That’s right and it becomes an important process because I photograph the landscape
using infrared. For me it’s a powerful symbol of revealing the unseen and a way of talking
about ancestral presence to be real and tangible thing. Since people are in the landscape of
Country forever, that’s . . .
TY: . . . our place.
DM: Yes, and what I see here is a return to the shape of memory. Those shapes are recordings
of presence, of human experience and relationships to Country, but also to people as well.
TY: Well, let’s look at what the story is because that’s the key. That’s what we’re doing when
we’re walking in those places: inhabiting that story. Actually, you’re not inhabiting the
story, the story itself is allowing you to inhabit the ontology of that place. That’s what
brings you a lens and that brings us back to infrared too. That’s important because it’s the
Dreaming layer. Remember our frst yarn? I said, “it’s that snake eye view!” and specifcally
the carpet snake from that place.
DM: I remember when you frst wrote about my work and used that expression ‘snake eye’. It
refected my thinking at the time, specifcally in relation to a camera with a sensor that’s
been converted to infrared. This is what really excited me when I read your article because
you got it and I think what helped was the fact that you had spent time in the rainforest. It
also goes back to beauty and danger being simultaneously present.
TY: You know those feelings of overwhelming ancestral connection are there in those power-
ful, powerful places but there’s so much fux in the young Dreaming of the place that your
family are from. There are so many things you’re looking at, from temperature and visible
light to everything else. I wanted to confrm that in scientifc way, but my frst look at the
literature found snakes don’t see in infrared at all. I thought “am I wrong with the ‘snake
eye’ comparison?”, but then I found there is a class of snakes that does see in infrared, and
it is a class that carpet snakes belong to.
DM: That’s very interesting.

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TY: It was validating to see, and I thought “that’s another data set I can poly-angulate into this!”
DM: When you described the photographs as being snake eye images, it was very apt. I had been
asking myself when making the photographs how the world would be viewed through a set
of eyes that are beyond earthly and the flm Predator repeatedly came to mind.
TY: Yeah!
DM: The flm is interesting for diferent reasons, but from a perspective of looking and seeing
the environment through alien or ‘other eyes’, it’s somewhat possible to understand the
point of view of ‘something’ rather than ‘someone’.
TY: Well, they had an Indigenous character there. He was the frst one to die: Billy was a native
American so he’s the one who can see the invisible. He’s looking at something no one else
can see, but we don’t get to see through his lens.
DM: It’s an interesting commentary around perception, life and death in the jungle and tight
cycles of mortality and time. What I’m trying to integrate is the idea that photographs,
particularly archival images, have an evocative quality that represents an archaeology of
time. Bringing together archival imagery with the photographs that I’m taking now is like
a physical compression, a layering of things so there is a visual stratum.
TY: There is that, but you have mentioned when you’re walking on Country, when you’re
walking in the jungle, you are in story. You are in a story place that you know and so you’re
in story time which, as you know, is very diferent time. Our cognition as a species is bound
up with walking Country in place and in story.
So there you are, walking in that place with your camera and what do you think hap-
pens, is this a kind of ritual magic you’re doing? Does it feel in some ways you are breaking
the boundaries that in turn create this entropy of the arrow of time?
DM: Bringing something back to the world of the visible is the job of the artist. But frstly,
the region around Cairns has a young history both in terms of its volcanic landscape and a
relatively young history in terms of colonialism. When I do walk that landscape, I’m keenly
aware of the fact that the ghosts of a recent past are very present.
TY: It’s very recent.
DM: When northern Queensland was being colonised, photography became a potent and
important late colonial instrument for showing a version of progress. It also became a tool
for documenting what was erroneously predicted to be the demise of Aboriginal people
and culture because of colonialism.
Photography has a way of pausing time so there was a supposed act of preservation being
undertaken. Not just preservation of memory, but of a people through image; the camera
and the gaze as we know from photographic history can be domineering. Consequently,
there’s a particular perception generated around subjects and a one-sided narrative con-
trolled through the lens and what was narrated in relation to those images.
TY: Ah, brings me back to Predator again and how much we see in that movie through the
lens of this alien. At some point the question comes up “what’s your lens?”. You’re either
Arnie or the Predator.
DM: It brings up all those fears and anxieties about being colonised.
TY: Poly-angulation happening. I would like to be able to have that complexity lens to look at
the systems and understand their structures and know when something’s out of place, or
when something’s happening or has happened in a convergence over time. It’s time and
place that indicate an event, even a future event.
DM: It’s a way of bringing history and cultural perspectives together. What is held in the
imagery is a kind of a cultural memory, but as we come back to the shape of memory it
becomes quite abstract in that you are not just dealing with Country . . .

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TY: . . . there’s potential there for remembering the future, because if you’re seeing that entire
system, then you’re seeing what it’s doing, where it’s going, where it’s been: everything.
DM: This notion of memory and the landspace is encompassing and they relate strongly to oral
histories. Stories are very present . . .
TY: There is so much hidden in your work! Sometimes I feel like there’s been a couple of times
when I have understood enough and you’ll say, “hey look at number 67 in the top left corner!”
DM: The imagery has a power in bringing strands of history and narrative together. It’s inevita-
ble their meaning will unfold in the future, and this comes back to ideas and timelessness.
Nothing is simply bound and captured in photographs, nothing is bound and captured in
an instant. It has its own life, and it travels according to the way that we see it, read it, and
receive it at diferent points in time after it’s been made.
TY: Time travel is only possible if you’re inhabiting the arrow of time. But I tell you, this is to
be continued.
DM: I think there’ll be more to talk about!
TY: All universes to explore here, beautiful stuf. Thank you bruz.
DM: Look forward to it Tyson.

References
Mabo. (1992) Mabo and others v The State of Queensland (No2) (1992) 175 CLR 1, 3 June 1992, [Link].
io/article/67683 [Accessed 10 January 2022].
Stanner, W.E.H. (1974) The 1968 Boyer Lectures: After The Dreaming. Sydney: ABC Books.
Stanner, W.E.H. (2011) The Dreaming & Other Essays. Collingwood: Black Inc.

2.7 THE ROLE OF THE ANDEAN PEOPLE IN THE WORK OF MARTIN

CHAMBI, REVISITED
Andrés Garay and Moritz Neumüller
Martin Chambi (1891–1973) is undoubtedly one of the most prominent photographic fgures
in the frst half of the 20th century in Latin America. His work had been recognized and pub-
lished already in his lifetime, especially in his native Peru, but also in other countries, mainly
Chile, Bolivia, Argentina, Mexico, and Spain. It was also widely published even in magazines,
especially in Buenos Aires and Lima, but also in National Geographic (1938). Yet it was the post-
humous retrospective projects, Martin Chambi & Edward Ranney at the Museum of Modern
Art, in 1979 that triggered a comprehensive international reception. This travelling exhibition
has led to a huge interest that resulted in other major exhibitions, mainly in Spain, France,
Argentina, the United States, and, of course, Peru. In order to understand Chambi’s reception
history, though, it is important to deconstruct the myth that he was “discovered” posthumously
by Ranney and his team of American researchers and embrace the idea that he was not only one
of the best-known image-makers in his country and other parts of the continent but also linked
to the cultural and intellectual stratum that drove the Indigenismo movement.
This contribution is based on a previously published article, which already warned about
“an all-too exoticizing gaze towards Chambi’s work” (Garay and Neumüller 2011: 65). On this
occasion, we would like to place Chambi’s oeuvre in the context of a revitalized wave of postco-
lonial discussions around the concepts of identity, representation, and “mestizaje”, a term much
older than the English “miscegenation” and not considered as ofensive but one of transcultura-
tion, which has defned Latin American identity.

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 Andean People in the Work of Martin Chambi, Revisited

From Coaza to Arequipa

Martín Chambi was born into a life full of difculties, in Coaza, a mountain village near Lake
Titicaca. However, he knew how to take advantage of these circumstances in his own way and
became one of the most important photographers in the country and even in the continent. His
father worked in the Santo Domingo mining company, and it was there that the young Chambi,
according to a family story, had his frst contact with photography, through a chance encounter
with a British photographer. The teenager was fascinated by the medium and spent two years
panning for gold to save money to travel to Arequipa and learn the craft of photography from
local masters. After four years in the famous studio of Max T. Vargas and fve years in the Vargas
Brothers Art Studio (no relation to Max T. Vargas), he left Arequipa for the small but prosperous
provincial capital, Sicuani, where he founded his own studio in 1918. Two years later, however,
he moved on to Cuzco, the legendary capital of the old Inca Empire, a tourism magnet, famous
for the then newly discovered Machu Picchu sanctuary. Martín Chambi, facing competition
from other photographers who had been active in the city for years, soon became the most
distinguished photographer of the city, and – by publications and exhibitions abroad – a pho-
tographic reference of the continent. However, there is still a lack of more in-depth research
on Chambi’s life and work. His craftsmanship and mastery are often presented as the peculiar
ingenuity of an exceptional talent, not as the peak of a movement or tradition. This isolated
view may be misleading, as is does not account for the quite developed landscape of photo-
graphic culture of the Southern Andes at the beginning of the 20th century. While primarily
concentrating on Chambi’s images of the Andean people, we want to contribute to a broader
vision of this celebrated photographer: one that takes into account both his artistic formation
in the European tradition and the cultural context of the Andean region in the 1920s and 30s.
We understand this approach as a step towards further broadening Chambi’s place in the general
history of photography, without neglecting his special origin, context, and artistic value.
By means of his photography, Chambi introduces us to the socially and historically complex
scenario of a region split up into politically independent (and often belligerent) notions within
a continent that was looking for its own cultural identity, which was found in the heritage of
the high cultures of the past: the Mayas, Aztecs, and, of course, the Incas (Gutiérrez 2008: 1).
Therefore, looking at Chambi also means looking at Cuzco, the Andes, its history, its cultural
mix, its people, and their environment, which the artist has portrayed throughout his lifetime.
Another unavoidable fact in the analysis of Chambi’s work is his biographic duality: Chambi
combines Indigenous and Western infuences; he spoke Quechua, but also Spanish. He was an
elegant city man, who could however also easily ft into the social substratum of the Indigenous
communities. It was perhaps precisely this tension that made him a modern man, a successful
photographer, and an infuential artist whose visual language was and is unique. From his artis-
tic awareness and self-afrmation, he used the photographic camera as a vehicle to introduce
himself into the high social circles of Cuzco. Together with his family and his assistants, he ran a
business that covered all technical aspects of the studio portrait, as well as commissions of wed-
dings, social gatherings, family portraits, parties, and so on. This diversity of clients and situa-
tions required a set of standard solutions in terms of image frame, illumination, and developing,
which allowed resolving the majority of possible cases that could come up.
His mastery of the medium is in part a debt to his apprenticeship in Arequipa. Since the
mid-19th century, Arequipa has been strongly infuenced and shaped by cultural and social
impact of its European immigrants. Towards the 1890s, the city had become a centre of pho-
tography, both in terms of studios and travelling photographers that usually came from Italy,
France, the United States, Bolivia, Spain, Portugal, Germany, and England. The society had

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a strong European component and a Western-style taste, yet its substrate was mainly criollo. It
was here Chambi acquired his knowledge of the technical and aesthetic aspects of photography.
When he settled in 1908 in Arequipa, the photographic scene was dominated by two studios,
that of Emilio Díaz and that of Max T. Vargas: two local photographers who were the state of
the art and fashion, especially when it came to artistic portraits and outdoor scenes (Garay and
Villacorta 2007). Max T. Vargas, almost twenty years older than Chambi, had two photographic
studios, one in Arequipa and the other in La Paz, Bolivia, and was about to travel to Europe. In
his work, he covered architectural and archaeological heritage in the southern Andean region
of Peru and northern Bolivia and took representative studio portraits. Early 20th-century soci-
ety in the Andean region was characterized by strict class consciousness and a constant search
for identity. Hence, there was a strong demand for portraits. The concern was less about the
retention of a likeness for posterity. Rather, the customers came to the studio to obtain a docu-
ment to certify a certain status in the social hierarchy. Photographers such as Vargas – and later
Chambi – were well aware that they were asked to endow their portraits with a photogenic
reality that did not always correspond to that of the model, the location, or the social context.
In this sense, the client “went to the studio, not in order capture his personality but to insert his
face into an image that might be unreal, but visually pleasing. . . . The retouching pen and knife
complete and shape the photographically obtained image” (Coloma 1986: 161). Both Vargas
and Chambi used large-format cameras, a fairly simple studio setting with a single background,
few requirements, and natural lighting to favour their clients. This simplicity gave their portraits
a certain quality of spontaneity and visual refnement. In Chambi’s case, the backdrop is often
replaced by selective focus and a very shallow depth of feld and a characteristic lightening,
which Chambi called the Rembrandt Efect (a technique he had learned from the Vargas Her-
manos), which he also applied to some of his self-portraits. This technique was made popular
in Peru by the American photographer William Kurt in the 1860s and consists in a variation
of what is called “short lightening” in portrait photography. However, the name was used soon
after in a very general way, designating studio lightening that plays with strong light/shadow
efects (Garay 2010).
Another key idea that Chambi took over from his master Max T. Vargas was the notion of
Peru as a country constructed on typically Andean aspects, such as people and customs, land-
scape, and cultural heritage. These were the subjects that Vargas used for his postcards, which
were partly printed in Germany or self-published in “Arequipa & La Paz”. Chambi later trans-
ferred the same practice to Cuzco, both for subject matter and target costumers, that is, tourists,
researchers, and locals. In this sense, the case of Vargas and Chambi supports Enrico Sturani’s
claim for a new view on the postcard industry in peripheral regions (2001).
Max T. Vargas’ assistants included many photographers who later made names for themselves.
His studio acted as a magnet for aspiring artists and was very infuential for the development
of photography in the region. Towards the end of his nine-year-long apprenticeship, Martin
Chambi had won prizes from the Centro Artístico de Arequipa, presented his works in exhibi-
tions, and established personal relationships with the local photographers, such as the Herma-
nos Vargas, Emilio Diaz, and Enrique Masías, and the painters Vinatea Reynoso and Martínez
Málaga, as well as with writers, intellectuals, and poets (Garay and Villacorta 2007: 19–22). If
Chambi later (e.g. in an interview in 1947) claims that “my art is Arequipenian, because this is
where I learned to make landscapes and portraits”, he also refers to a style that can be described
as clearly European, or rather Europeanized, despite its regional infuences. Vargas’ architectural
views, postcards, and studio portraits (some of them also show the Indigenous populations)
epitomize this Europeanized style, as do the works of the Italian-Bolivian photographer Luigi
Domenico Gismondi, for example, his studio portraits of Indigenous people (Querejazu 2009:

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90–91). For one of them, Gismondi dresses up his own son as an Indigenous girl (sic!), a mas-
querade that shows the clear distance of the photographer from the “exotic” world he depicts.
Chambi, on the other hand, develops a style that is based on an often daring visual language
and a truly authentic relationship to the subjects. While taking over the achievements he had
been taught in Arequipa quite directly in his commercial work, he considerably adapted and
extended them for his lifetime project to document the Andean people, their cultural heritage,
and their present-day way of living. This project started in Arequipa already, but it was in the
ancient capital of the Inca Empire that it fully developed.

Cuzco and the Indigenist Movement

After arriving in Cuzco with his family in 1920, Chambi quickly integrated into the new envi-
ronment. Although it is insisted that there was professional collaboration between Chambi and
the photographer-painter Juan Manuel Figueroa Aznar (Huayhuaca 2018: 37), this relationship
did not exist. Chambi worked alone in his early days in Cusco (Garay 2021) and soon had his
own studio that served a wide range of social strata. The 1920s were a time of ideological ten-
sions in the ancient capital, as it underwent, according to Jorge Flores Ochoa, its “frst mod-
ernisation”, which caused important changes in the traditional feudal structures (Flores Ochoa
2010). In this context, the train connection between Cuzco, La Paz, and Buenos Aires should
be taken into account, as it supplied the southern Andes region with the latest publications,
trends, and visitors from Europe, weeks before they could arrive at the capital, Lima, by boat.
The social classes sufered, in consequence, unsuspected adjustments that strongly contrasted
with the rural heritage. An urban proletariat formed and defended its rights by means of trade
unions and communities of interest, which led to social contrasts and juxtapositions. Chambi
documented this shift with a sharp and modern eye but by means of a personal, non-dramatized
vision, something quite rare in the circles of the artists and intellectuals of the moment. In this
context, the debates around concepts such as “indigenous”, “land”, “history”, “identity”, and
so forth were echoed in the majority of publications that blossomed during the romantic Indig-
enous crusade in Cuzco. It was Luis Valcárcel who led the Indigenismo movement and preached
the renunciation of the “moribund European Civilization”, for example, in his Glossary of the
Inca’s Life: “Only if we go back to the land we can purify from the bad habits of our false urban
democracy. . . . The simple peasant’s life will restore the confdence and cheerfulness of a life
that we have lost due to our servile imitation of everything foreign” (Valcárcel 1922).
It was precisely from Europe, however, that the same romantic ideas and claims for a reen-
gagement with the rural past swept over. Lily Litvak points out that it was from these premises
that the archetype of the farmer as the incarnation of the people arose, endowed with his
elemental qualities: “simplicity, patience, constancy, linked to the immemorial past by collective
experiences, integrated with the land by rituals and customs, and transmitter of a telluric wis-
dom” (1991: 53–54). Photographs such as Rudolph Koppitz’s Heavy Burden (ca. 1930) symbol-
ize this reversion to the soil and show interesting parallels to Chambi’s melancholic images from
the same years. The fact that the Indigenous people of the Andes actually do have a strong link
to the land and to the past was underlined, and then politically used by the Indigenists. Martin
Chambi’s work must be seen in this socio-political context, but not as part of it in the sense of
unconditional adherence. In fact, Chambi’s search for his own artistic, not political, language
was criticized by the dominant tendency of the Indigenismo, which demanded a return to the
Andean roots and the re-creation of the Inca Empire. For example, José Uriel García, in his arti-
cle ‘Martin Chambi, artista neoindígena’ (1948), praises Chambi’s works but laments his lack of
determination to denounce injustice more feverously. Chambi’s works have been described as a

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visual expression of this political movement, because they depict a vision of the Andean people
that celebrates, on the one hand, the past glory of the Andean culture, and they do not avoid,
on the other, showing the crude postcolonial reality. However, his images also bestow a certain
dignity on the subjects, as they seem to express a great solemnity, even pride, in their postures,
clothing, and looks. Formally speaking, they are nearly treated the same way as his upper-class
clients who have paid for their portraits to be taken in the studio or an exterior setting.

Mestizaje and Cultural Heritage

In an announcement for the Gran Estudio Fotográfco de Martín Chambi e Hijos in a magazine in
1934, we can read that it “has achieved, among other things, to make known in the fve parts
of the world the marvels of architecture, landscape, types, customs, etc. of the land of the Incas”
(Chambi 1934). In his solo exhibitions, however, Martin Chambi mainly concentrates on his-
toric riches of his culture, landscapes, and architecture, which he refers to as a mestizaje Colonial
(Chambi 1936). As can be judged from the prints for period exhibitions acquired by the Jan
Mulder Collection, these works – mounted on cardboard for direct hanging on the wall –
are carefully composed, often have dramatic light efects, and are mainly tinted in the colours
red, blue, green, and sepia, according to the taste of the time. Chambi is free from the fear
of being overly pictorialist – a discussion that did not exist in Peru. Nor is he “decorative and
over-sentimental” as Publio López Mondéjar (1990: 15–16) would have it, when he says that
Chambi progressed from his “balbuceos decorativistas y sensibleros” (decorative and mushy
babble) to full aesthetic maturity between 1927–30. Not only is López Mondéjar’s judgment
clearly fruit of a projected posterior viewpoint, but it is also clear that such a transition cannot
be proven: In a photograph that shows Martin Chambi mounting his works on a gallery wall,
we can clearly make out images that would belong to this “decorative babbling” phase beside
more “mature” images, which makes it clear that, for Chambi himself, this distinction did not
exist, at least not in his exhibition practice.
For him, the virtue and mission of his imagery are to disseminate the beauty of his country,
showing both colonial and Indigenous architecture, white and “bronze-coloured” people (Lira
Espejo, cited in López Mondéjar 1990: 18), the city and the rural environment. These pictures
are documents but do not use the documentary language to denounce the crude reality of the
dispossessed rural population. It has been claimed that he chose this rather melancholic, inofen-
sive approach “in order not to hinder his recent access to the middle class and the possibility to
provide his family with a status and an education far from the rural precociousness” (Castellote
2008: 11) he came from himself. However, we are more inclined to see an deliberate artistic
intention behind this decision to stay clear of a direct politic and judgmental documentary prac-
tice and to describe his people in terms of a somewhat monumentalized dignity and melancholy
by means of balanced compositions, difused natural lighting, and harmonious distribution of
the pictorial elements. With this density of his work, Chambi seems to ft the defnition of a
modern visual discourse of the Peruvian Andean south as a complex but diferentiated cultural
core or centre (Majluf 2015: 281).
As part of his intention to document Peru’s cultural heritage, Chambi also showed a great
interest for music and instruments (both autochthonous and imported by the colonizers), for
costumes and dresses, rites and celebrations, but also the new inventions, such as tennis clubs,
cars, and motorcycles. Yet it is really the common people who captured his interest. By con-
vincing his compatriots to pose for photographs in their mother tongue, he obtained a sponta-
neous and direct relationship with the photographic subjects and avoided the colonizing gaze
of his many photographer colleagues that came from the capital or other countries to capture

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exotic views of the Andean region. Although Chambi sought out characteristic motifs for his
postcards and magazine illustrations, he captured them with a certain spontaneity generated
naturally by his own ethnic background. However, he did not hesitate to arrange people and
fnd the right camera angle in order to create a balanced composition in his group portraits or
to counterbalance architectural elements for his postcards (Latorre 1998:147–149).
Sometimes, he takes people from the street to his studio portraits and photographs them in
the same technique, decor and illumination as in his commissioned portraits. These documents
do not get retouched or manipulated in any way. They represent types and customs in the Euro-
pean tradition of the Volkstypen and the picturesque portrait. In this sense, Chambi’s Chicha-
carrier, as well as Max T. Vargas’ beggar, follow the same logic as the Romanian photographer
Carol Szathmari’s farmers and gypsies (Ionescu 2007), for example. A comparison of Chambi’s
Gendarmes to August Sander’s Customs Ofcers shows a surprisingly similar composition, enact-
ment, and even posing. Chambi’s portraits, however, do not share the ethnologic focus of the
Albums published since the mid-19th century in Europe, nor do they follow the strict ratio of
Sander’s life-project. Far from a cataloguing, rather, we fnd sensitive and magical moments of a
relationship between the photographer and his subject in a kind of mutual human discovery and
exchange of a sense of belonging and of time (ancient for modern), all within the framework of
a commercial studio but without the habit of self-representation of the paying client and with
no other intention than to capture the essence of the Andean people, the light in their faces
and gazes, the tone of their skin, the texture of their clothes. If we look at the portrait of the
so-called Giant, it is clearly a photograph of a curiosum, a distinctive character whose extraordi-
nary size was due to the acromegaly he sufered from, much taller than the Peruvians in general
and therefore a somewhat “extravagant” image in the light of a naive reading of the 21st century.
However, the dissemination of this photograph was practically nil, except for a publication in
October 1925 in which the human story of the character is told (Schwarz 2000). In fact, Mar-
tin Chambi did not include this photograph in any of his exhibitions or publications. It can be
argued that this anecdote underlines what can be seen more directly in Chambi’s best images of
the Andean people: that he was not interested in the otherness of the subject but rather in the
commonness, a symbolic, emotionally charged relationship of a concrete to a universal mean-
ing. In his non-commissioned work, Chambi was not an anthropological or ethnographical
collector of images but a portraitist looking for a dignifying and meaningful representation of his
vis-à-vis. Furthermore, his natural and direct engagement with the people helped him to stay
clear of overly political messages that the Indigenistas (many of them intellectuals who did not
even speak any of the Indigenous languages) claimed. He was an artist who combined, in life
and work, the autochthonous Andean culture with an imported European Modernism. This
bipolar identity furnished his images of the Andean people with a magical power and a universal
aesthetic that goes beyond his own lifetime.

References
Castellote, A. (ed.) (2008) Martin Chambi poeta de la luz, exhibition catalogue, Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte
Iberoamericano/Ediciones Larivière.
Chambi, M. (1934) “El Gran Estudio Fotográfco de Martín Chambi e Hijos”, announcement in KOSKO,
Revista Libre, vol. III, No. 68, Cuzco, August 22.
Chambi, M. (1936) “El Alma Quechua alienta en los cuadros de un Artista Vernáculo”, Hoy, vol. V, No.
224, Santiago de Chile, March 4.
Coloma, I. (1986) La Forma Fotográfca. A propósito de la fotografía española desde 1839 a 1939. Malaga: Uni-
versidad de Málaga y Colegio de Arquitectos.
Flores Ochoa, J. (2010) Personal interview with Jorge Flores Ochoa, Cuzco, 2010.

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Garay, A. (2010) Martín Chambi por si mismo. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, pp. 86–91.
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searcher, 16, 64–75.
Garay, A. and Villacorta, J. (2007) Max T. Vargas y Emilio Diaz, dos fguras fundacionales de la fotografía del sur
andino peruano (1826–1926), Lima: Ediciones ICPNA.
García, J. U. (1948) “Martin Chambi, artista neoindígena”, Excelsior, August–October.
Gutiérrez, R. (2008) ‘El aporte de Martín Chambi a la revalorización de la arquitectura peruana’, in
Castellote et al. (ed.) Martin Chambi poeta de la luz, exhibition catalogue, Buenos Aires: Museo de Arte
Iberoamericano/Ediciones Larivière, pp. 11–22.
Huayhuaca, J. (2018) “Revisión de dos grandes de la fotografía cusqueña. El caso de Juan Manuel Figueroa
Aznar y su relación con Martín Chambi”. Hueso Húmero, 69, 37.
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Fotogeschichte, 103, 47–60.
Latorre, J. (1998) Santa María del Villar, Fotógrafo Turista, Pamplona: Instituto Príncipe de Viana.
Litvak, L. (1991) El tiempo de los trenes. El paisaje español en el arte y la literatura del realismo (1849–1918),
Ediciones del Serbal: Barcelona.
López Mondéjar, P. (1990) La magia de Martín Chambi, Martin Chambi 1920–1950, Madrid: Lunwerg.
Majluf, N. (2015) “Martín Chambi, fotografía e indigenismo”. Chambi, Lima: Museo de Arte de Lima,
p. 281.
Querejazu, P. (2009) Luigi Doménico Gismondi. Un fotógrafo italiano en La Paz. La Paz: Ed. Querejazu Libro
de Fotografía 01, pp. 90–91.
Schwarz, H. (2000) “¿Gigante de Paruro?”, El Peruano, Lima, 14 de noviembre de 2000, p. 14.
Sturani, E. (2001) “Das Fremde im Bild. Überlegungen zur historischen Lektüre kolonialer Postkarten”.
Fotogeschichte, 79, 13–24.
Valcárcel, L. (1922) “Glosario de la Vida Incaica”. Revista Universitaria, XI(39).

Further Reading
Martin Chambi, catalogue, Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, 2006, contains biographical information as well
as an extensive list of (life-time and posthumous) exhibitions up to the date of the publication; Martín
Chambi: Photography, catalogue with texts by Jan Mulder, Horacio Fernández, Andrés Garay, and Fran-
çois Laso, Barcelona: RM, 2022.

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