The photograph as archive: Crafting contemporary Koorie culture

In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia, created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art/cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor wearing such adornment. In this article, I b...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of material culture
Main Author: Thorner, Sabra G (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Sage Publ. [2019]
In: Journal of material culture
RelBib Classification:BB Indigenous religions
KBS Australia; Oceania
ZB Sociology
Further subjects:B Photography
B Archive
B culture-making
B Australia
B artworlds
B urban Indigenous
Online Access: Volltext (Resolving-System)
Description
Summary:In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia, created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art/cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor wearing such adornment. In this article, I bring the necklace and the photograph into the same analytical frame, arguing for the photograph as an archive itself. I consider the trajectories through which the 19th-century image has been replicated and circulated in various productions of knowledge about Aboriginal people, and how a 21st-century artist is mobilizing it not just as a repository of visual information, but also as an impetus to creative production. She produces objects of value and is making culture anew, in a context in which Aboriginality has long/often been presumed absent, extinct or elsewhere.
ISSN:1460-3586
Contains:Enthalten in: Journal of material culture
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1177/1359183518782716