We acknowledge the traditional owners of the unceded land where we (have) live(d) and where this work is embedded: Boonwurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations in and around Naarm (Melbourne, Australia). We pay respect to Elders past, present, and emerging.

Sabra Thorner: I thank my co-author, Maree, for her generosity, always. I also thank – in addition to the institutions and individuals named in the text that follows – Gerard Hayes, Melinda Hinkson, Vicki Couzens, Jessa Rogers, Kimberley Moulton, Anna Weinreich, Kristin Dowell, Robin Nagle, and Lynn Morgan for their insights and support of this collaborative work. I also thank Paolo Favero, Janine Prins, and Beate Engelbrecht for their engagement with our thinking and experimentation with this form; and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtfulness in making our written work stronger.

Maree Clarke: I acknowledge my dear friend and soulmate, the late Len Tregonning, for his kindness and generosity in passing on his deep cultural knowledge – he is truly missed. I also acknowledge the traditional peoples of the land of the Kulin Nations, on which I live and work, along with my Ancestors, whose knowledge of this land continues to inspire me daily in my art practice. I thank Vivien Anderson and Amy Boyd from Vivien Anderson Gallery for their support in representing me and in promoting my artwork to a broader public. I acknowledge the many friends and family (including my co-author Sabra) who continue to support my art practice, especially as we work together to create new art. I also acknowledge my nieces and nephews and all the young people with whom I continue to have the great pleasure to work and whose enthusiasm for embracing the knowledge and practice of our Elders and Ancestors indicates a willingness to learn and to adapt our cultural knowledge in the 21st century. These new and dynamic expressions of culture continue to demonstrate our resilience as First Nations peoples and in keeping culture strong for future generations.

Introduction

1In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia – Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti / Wemba Wemba / Boonwurrung) – created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art and cultural practice for the first time in over a century.  She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor – Yarruun Parpur Tarneen – wearing such adornment. She studied the two extant examples held in the Melbourne Museum (and later, in major collections around the world). She’d been yearning to make such a necklace for over 15 years, when she got the chance to do so through a commission from that same state museum.

2This photo-essay is premised upon the assertion that photographs are archives themselves; and we suggest that this understanding urges reimagination of what archives are and can do. Archives have become important sites of scholarly inquiry over the last 20+ years (Derrida 1998; Stoler 2010; Christen and Anderson 2019; Thorpe 2019). No longer taken for granted, archives are now actively investigated as cultures, institutions, and/or technologies with their own logics (that can then be resisted, responded to, and reimagined). In our work together, the archive is not a repository where information is retrieved, but rather a site of knowledge production; the archive is a metaphor for the traces, fragments, and materials that can be creatively (re)assembled and (re)invigorated in new contexts of collaborative co-production (Christie et al 2014).

3In Australia, photographs have been widely and successfully mobilized as historical artifacts, reproduced in various media and taken up in multiple trajectories of knowledge production about Aboriginal people (Lydon 2005; Lydon 2015). Photographs index social relations of the past that are themselves indicative of complex contact histories (Thorner 2019). Yet photographs also hold cultural knowledge which inspires art- and culture-making in the present. Their replicability is an important site of experimentation and innovation – photographs can be reprinted, diversely circulated, and infinitely recoded (Edwards 2001); and encounters/moments in time can be re-embodied and re-enacted (Thorner 2019).

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Video link: https://vimeo.com/​750396342

Making the Photo-Essay

5The photo-essay as a form in fact facilitates co-production and recursive knowledge sharing. By doing it together, we are implicitly asking questions about the relationships between peoples, our “cultures”, our images and texts, and how and why all of these are made. We were experimenting, wanting to tell a story that was more reliant on images than on text, hoping to inspire close-looking without audio and with very few narrative cues. We sought to avoid flattening photographs into evidence of something that happened in the past (Peterson 2005), and instead animate the photographs in a way that invited further learning and understanding.

7In many ways, this photo-essay is part of the same work, one venue in which we are engaging still photographs in ways that seek to honor collaborative co-production. Photographs are material objects (even as they have shifted, in many cases, from print to pixel), and they are things bearing affective storytelling potential, waiting to be activated, taken up, re-imagined, re-enacted. How could we mobilize photographs for the stories they hold? What are the ethical responsibilities and/or imperatives of showing, looking, storytelling (and what comes after)? Via the photographs here, we are telling stories (see more in the next section, below) and pointing towards the possibilities for more/different stories to be told; we are also asserting that the storytelling emerging from photographs is a valid and significant form of Indigenous knowledge transmission (Archibald et al 2019).

10Making the photo-essay felt more akin to filmmaking than to writing: we found ourselves thinking about sequencing, pacing, composition (also: color, framing, cropping), how it looked. We were striving for multivocality – not wanting to be too directive about the meaning of particular images – and paying careful attention to who had (or should have) the power to say what, and with what emphasis. We sought to produce movement (a story unfolding), ease transitions, and yet tell a story visually. Indeed, as we discuss in the next section, we wanted to tell a story with many stories embedded within it. We relied on collage, assemblage, and layering; we imagined our work in terms of foreshadow and flashback; we used repetition (and/or timing) for emphasis. We tried to stay away from linearity and tried to communicate, visually, in a way that might feel more circular, cyclical, or spiral-like.

12There is a tension between the ease with which digital and digitized photographs can be shared and circulated (on one hand), and (on the other hand) the recognition of Indigenous peoples’ rights to their images, their photographic objects, and the knowledge embedded within them. “Open-access” may be a completely incompatible approach, and one that ignores the dispossessing histories Indigenous Australians have endured and the ongoing struggles for legitimacy and visibility. Following Christen and Anderson’s work, we ask: are there ways to facilitate ethical access? Might alternative pathways of access allow people to acknowledge the weight of the histories of image-making and knowledge-circulating of Indigenous peoples, and to understand that they must have a say in how their cultural heritage circulates (even if/as the cultures of the worldwide web impose opposite pressures)?

Three Intersecting Stories

15First is the kangaroo-teeth necklace as a contemporary form of art-making, culture-making, world-making that brings together – activating knowledge embedded within – extant artifacts, archival photographs, text-based fragments of histories, oral storytelling among kin and community, and experimentation and innovation in the making of artworks that honor old practices yet also create something new. Maree’s practice is always collaborative (Thorner et al 2018) and necklaces are replicable. These characteristics of her work emphasize the priority of transmitting knowledge via making. This is an Indigenous knowledge paradigm, that making-together is a way of teaching others, inspiring greater understanding and empathy across difference (we’ve written together about this in Thorner et al 2018, Thorner et al 2019, and Edmonds et al 2020). This is also a practice rooted in Country (Indigenous Australian ways of understanding custodianship, care, and responsibility for land) and its life forms, including animals, plants, pigments; and that challenges clear distinctions of past, present, and future.

16The second story is: the histories of the c1880 photograph of Yarruun Parpur Tarneen, and how these exemplify knowledge-making about Aboriginal peoples. This – and other photographs included here – index the lives of people in the 19^th century who exchanged, interacted, cared for each other, and struggled for understanding: James Dawson and his daughter Isabella (see Dawson 1981, Dawson 1870), Yarruun (Louisa) and her husband Wombeet (Johnny). They were living in a time of great change in the nascent colony of the Port Phillip district (what would eventually become the Australian state of Victoria). Their descendants are also in relation with each other today (see, for example, Alberts et al forthcoming).

17Since the arrival of photography in Australia in the mid-19^th century, photographs have been made and circulated to produce Aboriginal people in specific ways: noble savages, racialized types, objects of scientific curiosity, passive victims of invasion upon their lands (Thorner 2019). Yet photographs wield multiple simultaneous overlapping potentialities: they reflect something that happened in the world; they index the social relations of a photographic encounter; they can be, and often are, taken up in contexts that depart from their makers’ intent(s). Further, because they are often of people, they tend to blur “the distinction between person and thing, subject and object, photograph and referent” (Edwards 2012: 222). What is known and what is not known, via photographs, via text, in historical and archival records, about these Ancestors? How might our photo-essay honor many different (sometimes overlapping or conflicting) claims to and relationships with those who came before us?

Concluding Thoughts

22Finally: how might we mobilize photographs for the stories they hold? What are the ethical imperatives of looking? How might the photo-essay advance our thinking in anthropology, and more broadly in approaching cross-cultural encounters with thoughtfulness and understanding? How does it offer new possibilities of intercultural co-production? Thinking about photographs as archives – they can be evidence of the past; they can also be made anew with an eye towards the future – is a way to understand them as impetus for further collaborative and decolonizing action.

23Books and articles