UNFIXED: Photography and Postcolonial Perspectives in Contemporary Art

PHOTOGRAPHY AND POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES IN CONTEMPORARY ART Edited by Sara Blokland and Asmara Pelupessy

Jap Sam Books, Heijningen Unfixed Projects, Amsterdam 2012

Previous spread, Hank Willis Thomas, 2011 for Unfixed Projects

06 introduction 11 exhibition documentation 20 charif benhelima 26 hank willis thomas 34 hulleah tsinhnahjinnie 42 keith piper 48 otobong nkanga 54 naro snackey 60 artist residency documentation keith piper

71 essays

Kobena Mercer

72 photography and the global conditions of cross-cultural modernity

rattana vandy

84 bomb ponds

NATALIE ROBERTSON 96 ‘can i take a photo of the marae?’ dynamics of photography in te ao maori Yamini Nayar

106 in space between

Sandim Mendes

116 pão pão, queijo queijo

Pamela Pattynama 126 colonial photographs as postcolonial social actors: the iwi collection Terry Kurgan

136 park pictures

Habda Rashid 146 clouds of fantasy and pellets of information LIZZA MAY DAVID

154 the unknown filipina

165 workshop documentation 177 symposium documentation 226

contributors

229

bibliography

231

index

INTRODUCTION sara blokland and asmara pelupessy

Photography has been called a window on the world, as well as a mirror for ourselves. However, critical contemporary views present challenging new perspectives within the field.

They question who is looking, whose history is represented and what the photographic image is staging, transforming photography beyond such simple metaphors as windows and mirrors. Now recognized as strategic parts of many social and economic structures, photographs are no longer seen as mere representations, but also as elements of complex visual discourses. Photography does not just fix time and space but (also) produces what we see.

A critical example of how photography was used to produce notions of the racial and social ‘Other’ was its role in anthropology. In the nineteenth century, photography was used to record and document colonial subjects (amongst others) for classification and determination of physical and mental capacities and cultural development. This, through the weight of science’s supposed objectivity placed them within the hierarchies of power that supported colonial ideologies.

UNFIXED’s fundamental framework confronts photography’s historical connection to this fixation of identity, which becomes especially urgent in the context of current debates over migration, culture and heritage. For this publication we ask how photography can be ‘unfixed’ through contemporary conceptual, theoretical and visual approaches, drawing attention to new critical perspectives in relation to the cultural conditions of postcolonialism.

In Unfixed, postcolonialism has been embraced as an ongoing process of liberation, anti-racism, sovereignty and self-representation. We consider it not as a set time period or an assertion, but a proposition, a question up for debate, and a reference point from which to move forward. More than a reflection on the past, we are interested in the shifting centers and hierarchies of power that postcolonialism implies and demands. These shifts, which are relevant not only to

those with a direct relation to colonial histories, but to us all, create space for new perspectives on the past, present and future. In terms of photography, which has been used to stop time, document and ‘capture’ its subjects, these shifts also imply the movement, circulation and migration of the people in front of and behind the camera, of the meanings associated with the images and of the images themselves (as objects or virtually). With UNFIXED we focus in on photography as it becomes detached from the secure territory of accepted, linear histories, author-subject hierarchy and two-dimensional display and perception.

For us as curators and editors, UNFIXED began with a shared interest in photography’s relationship to culture and postcolonial heritage. This was characterized by some key similarities and differences in our own hybrid cultural backgrounds. Both of us trace parts of our ancestry to former colonies, are children of migrants to the ‘West’ and identify with a juxtaposition of heritages, cultures, images and histories. The Dutch (Blokland) versus United States (Pelupessy) perspectives, language and sensitivities around culture and representation consistently came to the foreground in our meetings. Gradually these critical differences in the ways race, multiculturalism and cultural identity are constructed revealed themselves as productive opportunities to develop broader and more nuanced understandings about these issues, and also to expand these two Wests into a more global perspective. We began our collaboration during a period in which Dutch cultural and national institutions were working to reconcile their colonial legacies with contemporary multicultural society.

Focusing on photography, we found inspiring new concepts and approaches within the field of contemporary art and cultural studies. We were particularly interested by the ways in which artists and scholars used and analyzed not simply the object of the photograph, but the strategies

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and histories of photographic representation, considering photography variably, and even simultaneously, as medium, subject, and object. The artworks, ideas and debates presented in UNFIXED actively engage with and confront assumptions about photography and its relationship to truth, knowledge and power. UNFIXED brings forward current conceptual and practical ideas around photography’s capabilities to renegotiate its own histories and push the medium beyond simply documenting reality and bearing a single meaning. Contributors have done this through an impressive variety of approaches, such as recovering material from the archive, repositioning the viewer’s relationship to the photographic image in space and time, and working with strategies of multivocality and shared authorship in both production and presentation of photography.

ABOUT THE BOOK This publication is the concluding work of the eponymous multiplatform project that began in 2010 and included an artist residency, exhibition, workshop and symposium, all of which took place at the Center of Contemporary Art in Dordrecht (CBK Dordrecht), in the Netherlands. As a whole, the project engaged the topics of cultural identity and history, but with equal rigor also engaged strategies of artistic research, photo theory and contemporary practices around making, using, studying and writing about photographs. This publication brings together the perspectives of international artists, scholars and writers working in contemporary art, photography and cultural studies, all of whom share an interest in (and frequently, a personal connection to) migration, colonialism and diaspora. It combines documentation of the previous project platforms and events, and expands UNFIXED through the voices and visions offered in nine new, critical essays. These visual and textual essays take unique stands towards photography and its history through a diverse and unconventional range of approaches and styles. Together with the documentation, they explore topics such as vernacular photography, archives, memory, self-representation, visual sovereignty, exoticism and cultural protocol. essays The new visual and textual essays compose the heart of this book. The first essay presented in Unfixed is written

by British art historian and critic Kobena Mercer, whose work has been formative in the fields of visual culture and cultural studies. He is the author of Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), monographic studies on Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Isaac Julien, Renee Green, and Keith Piper, as well as historical studies of James Van Der Zee, Romare Bearden, and Adrian Piper. Mercer edited the Annotating Art’s Histories series, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008).

The other essay contributors were selected from the large response to our call for proposals. The theme in this call was ‘Unfixing photography’s fixed representations of cultural heritage, ethnicity and identity.’ We suggested that this could be addressed through a broad range of topics concerning photographic practice, history and/or archives. Proposals could deal with deconstruction, reconstruction, collage, appropriation, location, subjectivity and/or authorship within photography. In line with the rest of the project, we were interested in showing the work and ideas of people working across disciplines and from a variety of cultural contexts. More specifically, we were compelled by the experiential connection

these contributors had to the topics they were considering, and how this manifested in the essays which range not only from textual to visual, but from historical accounts to contemporary analysis and from political standpoints to philosophical perspectives.

Commissioned especially for UNFIXED, Kobena Mercer’s essay, ‘Photography and the Global Conditions of CrossCultural Modernity’ (p. 72) offers a critical account of the problematic relation between photographic theory and postcolonial studies. From conceptual art to studio portrait photography, Mercer challenges reductive notions of the postmigrant artist and multicultural inclusion. He argues that, ‘To say nineteenth century photography played a central role in fixing the image of non-western people as ‘other’ … is to say that, as yet, we still really only know one side of the story.’ (p. 73). His essay brings to the fore several themes which are central to UNFIXED, including photography’s ability to migrate and circulate, the archive of the Diaspora, photographic self-reflexivity, inter-subjectivity and shared control over representation.

British curator Habda Rashid’s essay ‘Clouds of Fantasy and Pellets of Information’ (p. 146), reflects on an intricately constructed collage of family photographs made by her father out of photographs from the United Kingdom and Pakistan. In her analysis of her father’s reconfiguration of the documentary nature of the photographs, Rashid’s essay examines the ways both personal memory and photography embody a complex interplay of past and present.

In ‘Colonial Photographs as Postcolonial Social Actors: the IWI collection’ (p. 126) Pamela Pattynama, Dutch professor in media, culture and literature, also addresses photographs and memory. Looking at the social history of a collection of photographs from the Indo-Dutch community, Pattynama’s discussion is rooted in one of the most contentious parts of Dutch memory: the loss of the Netherlands East Indies. After Indonesia’s independence, people of Indonesian-European descent migrated to the Netherlands, bringing family albums and other photographs. Reflecting on the movement of these photographs through different contexts, Pattynama considers their role in the postcolonial identity formation of the IndoDutch community in the Netherlands, and Dutch colonial nostalgia more broadly.

New Zealand artist, teacher and activist Natalie Robertson looks at the complex relation between photography and cultural heritage in her essay on considerations and protocol around photographing in Maori contexts. In ‘“Can I Take a Photo of the Marae?” Dynamics of Photography in Te Ao Maori’ (p. 96) she raises concerns over the ways in which photographs have migrated and analyzes photography from inside Maori culture, addressing issues such as cultural tourism, appropriation and visual sovereignty.

In his series of tranquil landscapes, Cambodian photographer Rattana (p. 84) documents the physical traces of war, creating a new document of history. Vandy’s photographs show craters created by United States bombings during the 1960s and 70s, known today as bomb ponds. The essay suggests a powerful dissonance between the aesthetic of the photographs and what they, as a form of evidence, call upon the viewer to remember.

South African artist Terry Kurgan’s visual essay ‘Park Pictures’ (p. 136) offers a unique view on the visual economy and social geography of Joubert Park, business territory for a large community of street photographers in inner city Johannesburg. Through mapping the photographers’ fixed positions in the park, photographing them and collecting the photographs unclaimed by their clients, Kurgan’s

UNFIXED EXHIBITION 15 NOVEMBER – 5 DECEMBER 2010

12

exhibition documentation

press release

13

invitation

14

opening performance

t. martinus / quinsy gario

Victorious Failures Who? I was told to fail. to fail beyond images could tell, to fail beyond words could express.

I was told to fail.

I was told to fail the house I grew up in, to fail the house I would live in, the house that I would break by being.

I was told to stand, to stand, to stand and stay short.

I was to write on the floor and say here it comes, there it goes and here we are looking at a white dot.

I would be looked at, I was told.

I was told to look down and never look up because when looking up you look into the light and the light is not good when you are there.

Sight is that which tries to capture you and captured you and captures you in bottles with no caps with bottles with no caps and bottles that are empty.

Who is staring at me, I kept asking and knowing at the same time.

But I would never know who would forever look.

Who would forever try place me on a pedestal and demote me by telling me that I am the best, that I am so natural.

Who? Who would look?

Performed by T. Martinus (Quinsy Gario), 23 October 2010

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18

exhibition documentation

exhibition overview

19

48

exhibition documentation

Otobong Nkanga 1974 NG/FR

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Otobong Nkanga is a visual artist and live performer. In the two related works that were presented in the UNFIXED exhibition, Alterscape Stories: Uprooting the Past (2006) and Memory of a Landscape (2010), Nkanga reflects on photography as a medium of memory, playing with notions of active performance, authorship and construction within the space inside the photograph. In the photo-work Uprooting the Past, Nkanga reconstructs a personal memory of a location via a meticulous scale model made in part from photographs. Overlooking and changing the landscape, Nkanga herself is photographed in the scene. The juxtaposition of scale and the artist’s presence in both the model and the frame of the photograph transform the image into something more than simply two dimensions.

In the piece Memory of a Landscape, viewers are initially presented with photographs drawn from the same location as Uprooting the Past. But moving around the corner, you can enter a passageway behind the image. This inner space is covered with Nkanga’s writings and drawings of facts, stories, memories and associations relating to the image displayed outside the space. These inner descriptions become a visual experience of an image captured not only through the decisiveness of a photograph, but captured also in Nkanga’s mind.

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exhibition documentation

Memory of a Landscape, 2010, Installation details

54

exhibition documentation

naro snackey 1980 NL

55

The work of the young Dutch artist Naro Snackey is almost like an organism that is constantly being relocated and reinvented through different perceptions and views on the photographic sources that she uses. Snackey’s work takes reconstruction and deconstruction to the extreme, literally cutting, tearing, nailing, painting on and drilling photographs to create two and three-dimensional collages.

The installation, Romantic Detachment (2010), was developed especially for the UNFIXED exhibition. Snackey has appropriated and transformed photographs from genealogical websites in which Dutch-Indonesians around the world search for their relations. In her approach she has been inspired by notions of the loss of the frame as a loss of protection and context, and the cut as an opening to possibility. The photographs themselves are recontextualized as subjects, gaining physical presence in space as the installation as a whole relates directly to the space it inhabits.

Romantic Detachment presents a fragile and elusive photographic history, provoking a longing through the distance of space and time.

56

exhibition documentation

Romantic Detachment, 2010, Installation detail Installation overview, p. 57

naro snackey

57

ESSAYS 72 Kobena

Mercer

photography and the global conditions of cross-cultural modernity

84

rattana vandy

bomb ponds

96 Natalie

‘can i take a photo of the marae?’ dynamics of photography in te ao maori

106 Yamini

Nayar

in space between

116 Sandim

Rashid

clouds of fantasy and pellets of information

154 LIZZA

Kurgan

park pictures

146 Habda

Pattynama

colonial photographs as postcolonial social actors: the iwi collection

136 Terry

Mendes

pão pão, queijo queijo

126 Pamela

Robertson

MAY DAVID

the unknown filipina

in space between

YAMINI NAYAR

Under a Night Sky, 2009 C-type print 91.4 x 121.9 cm

107

I also incorporate fragments of found images.

In fact, my overall process usually begins with an idea or thought connected to something I’ve seen, a text or a found image. I regularly research digital archives and collections of photographs for interesting images. Once I settle on an image, I print it out, paste it on my studio wall and begin sketching, to figure out the form and determine a starting point. I then create a sculpture from the image.

Yamini Nayar: I create large, colour photographs of sculptures I build on tabletops in my studio. Of varying scales, the sculptures are constructed from residual materials – scraps of Styrofoam, wood, paper, plaster, etc. – that I find rummaging through the excess and castoffs of businesses located around my studio.

Murtaza Vali: Can you describe your working process?

This interview is excerpted from an ongoing dialogue between Nayar and Vali, conducted both in-person and over email chats through Fall 2010 and Spring 2011, and often stimulated by cups of strong milky tea.

YN: Definitely. The sculptures are quite fragile.

Propped up and held together by thread and

MV: The photograph also seems to seal the sculpture into a particular arrangement.

YN: Precisely. I am very interested in how perspective and scale might be manipulated to orient and disorient the viewer. The threedimensionality of the sculpture is translated into a two-dimensional image; perspective shifts and space is flattened. The particular entry point into the scene the lens provides is what holds it all together, what ties up the loose ends. In this sense, my camera is a kind of collaborator – it alters what it looks at. The relationships that emerge in the photograph are specific to the image.

MV: The lens establishes a perspective.

I think of the sculptures as constructed moments. They are never intended to function as autonomous physical objects but are built, specifically, to be viewed through the lens.

At this stage I think and work like a sculptor more than a photographer. The found photographs are my anchors, the reference I keep returning to as the piece grows. Each image develops over time, accrues its own narrative, logic and sculptural process. Cycles of construction, erasure and reconstruction lead in unexpected directions, fragments of other elements and sources creep in. Each piece creates its own collection of residues and castoffs – materials and images – that are eventually incorporated. The original image is just a point of departure, a reference point, a map of a moment from the past, a fixed memory. The final photograph documents the erasures and traces of process.

MV: In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes’

YN: My photographs are endpoints but also beginnings.

MV: The final photograph serves as an endpoint.

It controls the chaos of process, collapsing the duration of sculptural process into a single indexical image.

YN: Magnification is key, specifically the ability of scale to create a world that can be both inhabitable and displaced.

MV: Scale shifts at numerous points in your process. The miniature, the ad hoc, the recycled are all monumentalized. Is magnification something you are interested in?

YN: The size of the photograph really depends on the sculpture, and what it needs to be clearly articulated. By this, I mean subject matter and level of detail. However, I am always aware that the final object is the photograph and not the sculpture. So the photograph needs to be a size that allows it to stand on its own and maintains a scale that allows the viewer to enter the space.

There is no real formula. More intimate spaces tend to be smaller, quieter. Others that allude to a public or collective use may be larger, to confront the viewer in a different way.

MV: How do you determine the size of your final prints? How does it relate to the miniature scale of the sculptures?

bits of tape they are impossible to move and are discarded after photographing. The photograph is both an entry point into the construction, held together by the lens, as well as a document of a destroyed object.

YN: Yes. [...]

MV: This simultaneity of past and future is palpable in your images. It might be why they feel somewhat off kilter, uncanny. Is the uncanny (unheimlich or unhomely) something that interests you?

YN: I understand Benjamin’s dialectical image as an image that describes a space that contains strong enough versions of future and past to startle us in some way to the present. It encapsulates and conflates desire and nostalgia.

MV: While you construct ruins, they are remnants not of structures and spaces of the past, but of those that have not yet come to be. They embody the future anterior.

YN: I think I allow a level of transparency. But I am primarily interested in photography’s ability to create a monumental moment, one worth remembering. I am interested in the presence and processes of memory. Walter Benjamin’s writings on the dialectical image and the ruin are more influential than Barthes. The sculptures are sites of ruin, tension and dialectics.

suggests that death haunts all photography. Your photographs monumentalize and memorialize the fragility and decay of the sculptures, preserve the humble experiences and detritus of everyday life from which they are constructed. But preservation is also always marked by death; for example, the way museums mummify the objects they collect, which become firmly of the past. Why does a dynamic and durational sculptural process have to end in a single static arrangement? Seriality might allow this dynamism and duration to remain legible.

112 in space between

Pursuit, 2010 C-type print 91.4 x 121.9 cm

YAMINI NAYAR 113

SANDIM MENDES P達o P達o, Queijo Queijo

Rapazinho, 2009, Gelatin Silver-print, 50 x 40 cm

122 P達o P達o, Queijo Queijo

P達o p達o, queijo queijo, 2010, Gelatin Silver-print, 60 x 200 cm

sandim mendes 123

Mixed family in front yard, circa 1920-1930 Photographic collection Tropenmuseum – IWI collection #30027502, 6.4 x 8.1 cm

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Pamela Pattynama Colonial photographs as postcolonial social actors: the IWI collection People often look to colonial photographs in search of history, approaching them as visual evidence of reality and presence, representations of past truth. But since what is known as the ‘material turn in anthropology’ around the late 1990s, scholars have begun to study photographs within a continuing process of production, exchange, usage and meaning.1 The material turn considered how objects, such as photographs, construct and influence the field of social action and stressed the complexity of social meaning in relation to objects. In this view, a photograph can not therefore be fully understood at any single point in its existence, but is better understood as part of a continual social process.2 For example, British anthropologist and curator Elizabeth Edwards considers photographs as ‘real visual objects’ that people engage with in real time and specific social spaces.3 Accordingly, a photograph is more than a historical source or proof of an event. Looking beyond the image content alone, to analyze the ‘whole performative quality of the image,’ photos become sites to uncover the ‘intersecting histories’ they involve.4 In the following essay, I will explore the ‘social biography’ of a specific photographic collection, the Indisch Wetenschappelijk Instituut (Indies Scientific Institute, hereafter IWI) collection. The IWI collection consists of a variety of objects, books and documents, including more than 60,000 photographs and about 550 albums brought together by Indo-Dutch postcolonial migrants ‘repatriated’ to the Netherlands after Indonesia’s independence in 1945.5 Instead of looking at these photos as passive images I approach them as social actors ‘with a life.’

Examining the IWI photographs as visual objects people have engaged with in different ways at different moments, I trace the entire trajectory of the IWI photographs and explore the collection as a dynamic and shifting archive across time and place.

1

Everybody’s memories Let us begin by looking at two IWI photographs taken in late colonial Indonesia, or the Dutch East Indies.

This photograph shows an Indo-European family (people of mixed Indonesian and European descent). There is a white father, an Indo-European mother and the children are mixed. The family members stand or sit in a garden in the front yard of a colonial home. They are dressed in the typical clothing local (Indo-)Europeans wore in and around the house during that time: women in sarong kabaja, men in white or batik trousers and a collarless, white shirt, and children in the comfortable play suit known as tjelana monjet (monkey suit). The photograph displays a unique characteristic of Dutch colonialism in the Indies, namely its encouragement of interracial sexuality and concubinage. In sharp contrast to French or British colonial rule, miscegenation in the Indies was encouraged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Asian female slaves and local women were the sexual partners of European men in unequal domestic arrangements.

Because the political authority of the Netherlands remained remote, and ’full-blood’ European women were scarce, the mixing of European men and Asian women evolved into a mestizo society based on extended mixed families.

Another late-colonial photograph, taken in a garden, shows a so-called baboe (Indonesian nanny). The young Javanese woman holds a sunshade and carries a white baby in a slendang (batik cloth). She looks straight into the camera and stands upright under a tree. A dog probably kept as a pet looks for something to eat near her naked feet. The photo reveals something about the power relations and intimate contacts between colonizers and colonials in the private zones of the Indies. Colonial families always had more than one servant and native girls and women were hired to look after the children

For more on material culture analysis see Peter Miller, ed., Material Culture: Why Some Things Matter (London: University College London Press, 1998). On material

developments in visual anthropology see Maurice Bank and Howard Morphy, ed., Rethinking Visual Antropology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997).

2

‘Introduction,’ Photographs Objects Histories, ed. Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart (London: Routledge, 2004) p. 1-15.

3

Elizabeth Edwards, Raw Histories. Photographs, Anthropology and Museums, 2001 (Oxford: Berg, 2006) p. 2.

4

Italian historian and pioneer of microhistory Carlo Ginzberg as quoted in ibid., p. 2.

5

The migrants from the Indies/Indonesia were called repatrianten (repatriats) although the majority among them never saw patria before. During the decolonization

movements following World War II, between four and six million people were ‘returned’ to Europe from colonized lands. Scholars have tended to overlook the experiences of these ‘invisible’ migrant communities returning ‘home’. See Andrea L. Smith, ed., Europe’s Invisible Migrants (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003).

TERRY KURGAN PARK PICTURES

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TERY KURGAN 143

Postscript Following global trends, the cell phone habits of South Africans have changed dramatically in the past year as smart phones, mobile applications and the mobile Internet have entered the mainstream. Curious to see how this change may have impacted upon the park photographers trade, I made a recent visit to Joubert Park.

To my surprise the group has grown, and there are now 48 photographers working out of the park.

Twenty-eight of those are members of the original group of 40 who worked with me in 2005, and they are still there in January 2011, occupying exactly the same positions. Although they have now all made the shift from film to digital (in 2005 this was about 50/50), they still carry around bags of unclaimed photographs. They complain a lot about how cell phone technology has interfered with their business and that people who have camera phones can send image MMS files to their far away loved ones by phone. To compensate for this loss of business, they have innovated something they call Same Time. Same Time means that the majority of them now own very small printers that they carry around in their bags, and to incentivise clients to commission their portraits, they offer to print them immediately.

Another entrepreneurial idea that seems to work is that several of the photographers have invested in the sort of cameras and printers needed to make photographs for identity documents and passports; and in this there seems to be a roaring trade at a much cheaper price than is offered at the stores.

symposium 15 NOVEMBER 2010

188 symposium documentation Presentation

10.55 hulleah tsinhnahjinnie (1954 Diné nation/us)

Visual sovereignty: A survey of indigenous photographers

[excerpts] My name is Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, born into the – well actually, my identity has changed lately – born into the Bear Clan of the Taskigi Nation, born for the Tsinhnajinnie Clan of the Diné Nation, adopted into the Killer Whale Fin House of Klukwan, of the Tlingit Nation. I found out from an uncle I am Seminol and Creek, but those are general terms, so the specific nation is ­Tuskegee.

My work has to do with reclaiming images, photographs that were taken by other people and presenting them and embracing them so that they become our own. It also has to do with creating images that speak to the colonial of the United States.

And there are images I create for the community, because that is what my foremost audience is, my community.

— But also my real work is to make people aware of our community of photographers. So Veronica Passalacqua, my spouse and I, we work together and have presented two international indigenous photographer conferences. There, we invited photographers from Aotearoa [New Zealand], Australia, Nunavut [in Canada], and United States. The first conference was ‘Our People, Our Land, Our Images.’

These are all the photographers that were present, and their nations. We also presented photographers who are a part of our history, but of course were overlooked by Western art history.

The second conference was ‘Visual Sovereignty,’ in 2009. There, we had about 33 international indigenous photographers. Natalie Robertson was in attendance, along with some of her friends. Photographers from the first conference came back and we also invited some new photographers, students, professional photographers, elder photographers.

— So in these conferences what we’re doing is we’re laying the groundwork for our photographic history. Who we can look up to, who we can relate to.

— Some of the photographers I had known when I was younger, and I would go back to them and ask them if they would come to this conference. So the type of work would range – we’d have not too many photographers that were more on an individual type of representation, but more so we were looking for photographers who were based in community.

This is the installation of [the exhibition] Visual Sovereignty.

The thing about visual sovereignty – again I was talking to the students yesterday – was that, one has to have a land base from which to exercise sovereignty. So it was just a natural progression to go to visual sovereignty.

— Meeting these photographers [at the conferences we organized] and interacting with them, what it has done is we’ve created a network.

To finish what I was saying earlier, was that we’re bypassing these sort of Western type of markers and what’s helping us is the web.

— And some of these photographs you may think that you have seen before, but again it’s the cultural context and how these indigenous photographers are looking. [—] You know, some people may say ‘Well what’s the difference of these photographs from a tourist photograph?’ Again, it’s the degree of understanding, the degree of the photographer understanding the cultural context. If one looked at this [image, Hula ‘Olapa i ka holunape (Swaying to the Beating Gourd Drum) by Lehua Waipa Ah Nee,] one wouldn’t necessarily understand the significance of the designs on the dress, on the regalia, also the colour.

— So for me instead of mainly talking about my work, it’s important for me for you to know that we have this indigenous photographic community.

— The conferences [we organized] didn’t come out of nothing.

Indigenous artists gatherings were already happening. The first one I went to was in Hamilton, Aotearoa and there were about a 100 indigenous artists gathered for a week. We were totally hosted and the only thing we had to do was find our way there. We were received at the airport, meals were made, we could work all the way into the night, the studios were open 24/7, we were shown the land, there was protocol.

That was my first attendance at an indigenous artists gathering (they had been going on almost for about 8 years) and I’ve gone to another one since then. This brought up the idea of bringing together indigenous photographers in the same way – hosting them, protocol. Then out of that the networking starts and then perhaps someone else will take that away and continue it.

— So the thing is that all this image making is happening, and – as I was talking to some of the students yesterday – we are in a way sidestepping the museums and the Western types of critiques because the Western types of critiques don’t apply to our work because the cultural context isn’t there.

— We have a modest museum at California University, Davis.

We say we have a modest museum but our cyberspace is indefinite, because we go well beyond the walls.

Exhibited works p. 34

hulleah tsinhnahjinnie

190 symposium documentation lecture

11.45 kobena mercer (1960 uk) Photography and the colonial conditions of cross cultural modernity: Offering a critical account of the often vexed relation between photographic theory and post-colonial studies, Mercer’s lecture will enter the archive of Diaspora to reveal the historical role of photography in shaping the cross cultural conditions of global modernity from 1900 onwards.

[excerpts] It’s a real pleasure to be part of this initiative. Postcolonialism is a term that gathers unto itself many different contradictory definitions but I think that the really interesting thing about this project is the way that it’s focused through the medium of photography.

— Taking photographs to produce art for display on gallery walls was only ever one application amongst a very wide repertoire of mixed uses. That’s the first important consequence. To assert that the medium cannot be fixed then in terms of having one unitary identity is to notice another.

When we look at the individual frame we raptly accept that the camera fixes or freezes a passing moment in time, but when we consider the multiple sites through which photographs circulate socially we recognize that all photographs are open to a process of decontextualization.

— In the early 1970s, cultural studies and conceptual art converged around the topic of the image-text relationship by paying attention to the role of the caption in fixing the polysemic qualities of an image.

I want to revisit this moment of the convergent crossover between cultural studies and conceptual art.

It may seem a bit archaic but I think it is relevant to our debate on postcolonialism in various ways. In particular, to bring a critical perspective to the debate on the politics of representation arising from the rediscovery of African vernacular photography, and studio portraiture in particular, which since the mid 1990s has been taken out of the archive and repositioned within the art institution, within the gallery and museum context of contemporary art.

— So looking back over the last 15 years we can say that archival research has resulted in several large-scale survey exhibitions which are not only important for understanding the history of photography under colonialism, and then after independence, but which also carries far reaching implications for our understanding of the global history of the medium per se.

— In my view what makes it postcolonial, is not just that it has black content, it’s not just that it was produced under the era of colonialism. What makes it postcolonial is the belatedness with which the material in the archive becomes legible, becomes readable and becomes valuable for the first time, only after a considerable period of latency or delay. So these pictures come to us 80, 90, 100 years later, during which time they where asleep, if you like; they were dormant in the archive, we weren’t ready to appreciate the value that they had.

So for me the next 15 years are interesting if you think about the research questions we might take on board, both in Essay p. 72

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the art context and in the academic world, when you realize that the knowledge about photography that we have gained over the last 15 years has the capacity to overturn what we thought we knew about the history of photography, the last 150 years since the 1850s. So it’s not simply that the received narrative we had in our textbooks and syllabi was Eurocentric with generalizations aspiring to universality that were really simply based on a very small sample which was not comparative; but that photography now reveals to us the planetary conditions of global modernity by showing us how colonial subjects appropriated and adapted its image making technology to depict their own experiences of modern life in the same time period.

— What the archive is revealing to us now demands that we conceptualize this simultaneity by which photographic technology was put to multiple antagonistic uses. And I think we need to tread carefully to get to such a place of analysis precisely because the politics of the postcolonial are multifaceted, there’s often an intense pressure to simplify the real time complexity before us.

— So to the extent that cultural studies was not invested in author named practices, either in documentary photojournalism or art photography, but concentrated on the impersonal codes and conventions by which socially shared meanings were agreed upon as truth, it cut across the authorcentered thinking of Modernism to rejoin conceptualism in a politics of representation. So we arrive at an interesting place of crossroads at this point, because there is of course the view that cultural studies and conceptualism are still in dialogue – that resulted in what became known as visual culture, and there are arguments pro and con. I just simply want to raise the critical point though, that it strikes me that an increasingly globalized art world that accepts its multicultural character would have a predicament in which the language of cultural studies is used, but often as a kind of hollow shell in which the institution is still thinking in ingrained and habitually modernist categories.

— I think inclusion is not enough, because without careful attention to the individual choices that artists are making at the level of form and at the level of their contribution to the medium, without that attention you have a state of affairs where multiculturalism really covers over the old dichotomy in which innovation is assumed to be a Euro-American prerogative. While artists from the global south are welcomed into the museum on the grounds of giving realist documentary truth.

So watching a Bill Viola video piece, we’re encouraged to pay attention to the formal strategies of editing, lighting, duration and so on. But when a work by Shirin Neshat is exhibited,

institutions do tend to encourage the audiences to engage with the work at the level of documentary truth. As if to say ‘Oh is this how Iranian women really feel about Islam today.’

Are we paying enough attention to lighting, framing, duration or film speed in the case of one artist as we do to another?

— And what’s interesting is that the conventional assumption of the museum is that minority artists from the periphery can be influenced by the Euro-American canon but it doesn’t travel the other way, which is not actually the case. [—] My whole point is that these kind of cross cultural entanglements, which for me make twentieth century art interesting, tend to get minimized and underplayed by the categories that the institution prefers; which is to think of image-text purely in form, mostly in formal terms, in relation to which difference simply becomes an add-on, rather than seizing upon difference as an opportunity to rethink the whole software program, it’s simply seen as something that supplements the canonical narrative of modernism.

— Perhaps it’s more useful then to think about what Boris Groys puts forward when he takes up the theme of loss of aura to suggest that if modernism addressed ‘the loss of a fixed, constant context of an artwork, and postmodernism addressed the world in which the artwork leaves its original context and begins to circulate anonymously in the networks of mass communication,’ then installation takes anonymous material out of circulation and suspends it in a temporary context, in the gallery and museum context, in which the artist’s decision making choices form the subject matter that engages the viewer. [in: Antinomies of Art and Culture, 2008, pp. 72-73] And I think we need to bear that in mind if we think about is it a rediscovery of African photography that is now exhibited in the institutional context of art or is it a repositioning?

Because that brings with it a broader dilemma, an interesting question. Is the appeal simply Afro vintage, that we’re recycling material from the archive, because it’s malleable and we can manipulate it to suit the demands of the industry, which is for more and more turnover, our rapacious desire for novelty, which is how the marketplace keeps moving forward. Or do we face the ethical issue of a redemptive reading of rescuing something that is lost and unknown, that can’t be retrieved or brought back, when it’s gone it’s gone, but which is important to us not because it’s evidence, which it is, but also because it’s art, because it has an aesthetic appeal, an aesthetic aura.

— It’s the demand to convert amnesia into recall. In other words, I think what the images are saying is that you do not have permission to forget me. And this is what gives an ethical dimension to the pleasures that we now associate with the aura of African vernacular photography.

—

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11.45 q&a with kobena mercer [excerpts] Ferdinand van Dieten [from the audience]: I have some doubt about using the word ‘art’ in this context. Where’s the division between image production and art? I should say, that has something to do with the self-reflection of art – that means the artist chooses his forms and that’s his subjectivity. And that kind of subjectivity is not in the story about images and archives, that’s not in the story about power relation to institutions and admission to institutions. That kind of subjectivity I miss it everywhere. Am I mistaken somewhere?

Kobena Mercer: Not at all, that is a very eloquent summary of a worldview I would characterize as classically modernist, in the sense that the emphasis on the artist’s subjectivity or, even what Henry Moore called ‘truth of the materials,’ was the key criteria for deciding artistic value. And I think that for the first 120 years photographers associated with Pictorialism almost had a chip on their shoulder as if the photograph was pleading to the institution, ‘Value me, take me seriously in so far as I resemble a painting.’

Whereas, Walter Benjamin, in 1934, said that this is totally unlike a painting, it’s also unlike a film, for other reasons, because you can make more and more copies. And because you can make copies you start to undermine the myth and the mystique of the individual genius alone in the tower who has this flash of inspiration. Which to be honest is something that enlightenment reason inherited from religion. So even though modernist scholars say to us they’re secularists and they’ve accepted the death of God, they want the artist to be a little God, alone in his studio. Whereas artists have always been stealing ideas. And it’s only with the shift from modernism to postmodernism, that the social life of images, the social relations of representation have received as much attention as the formal relations, even if postmodernism was problematic because it was very backward looking. It was about taking apart this huge edifice that was constructed not just with Demoiselles d’Avignon but also by the whole history of the museum, by the sort of postRenaissance history of the visual in the West.

And you’re right, absolutely right, because the archive is not giving us author-produced material and I don’t believe that Seydou Keïta or Samuel Fosso – they were photographers, but I don’t think they were artists. And that’s my question for Okwui [Enwezor] and Olu [Oguibe], that they’re looking at these African practitioners through the lens of an autuerist framework, whereas I am saying that the institutional repositioning needs to be taken into account as well.

— Natalie Robertson [from the audience]: I just wondered if you could you expand on the idea of the postmodernist breakthrough that gave access to the archives. I just wondered if it was a question of who has access to the archives, rather than just the postmodernist condition?

Kobena Mercer: It’s really the idea of appropriation isn’t it? I mentioned Cindy Sherman because that’s an enactment of the death of the author, if ever there was one. It’s not revealing ‘the real me’. We don’t get any closer to understanding who the artist was, but we do get an understanding perhaps of femininity or the idea of femaleness as it is constructed as an image.

So independently of that we can extract the broader concept of appropriation because prior to postcolonial theory the colonial relation was understood in very dichotomous terms as victim-victimizer. Even in the Marxist tradition of world-system theory the idea was that indigenous peoples were violated and decimated by gunpowder and syphilis, which they were, and that’s all that they were. So they could be corrupted, they could be distorted, they could be diseased. But guess what? They survived. The colonized not only survived, they actually made choices as to what they would take from the technologies imported by the West, which were violent, which were death bringing. But what they could take and appropriate for their own purposes – and when we shift forward from modernity, which is the big sociohistorical envelope of planetary experience, to modernism, which is art’s specific response to thinking about the conditions of life under modernity, we see that for the first 80 years art historians were looking at the work of, let’s say Albert Namatjira, in the Australian indigenous context, who was seen as a mimic, as someone who was simply imitating what had been imported by the West. And it’s only really with the deconstruction of the primitivist mindset that we can see with the concept of appropriation how colonized peoples actively took, they made choices, they could pick and choose.

The other side to that is what kept the material dormant for 80 or 90 years it was the institutional discourse of primitivism. It was Western curators saying we want tribal carvings, we already know what we want Africa to be.

And if there is a photograph showing what looks to be black Edwardians in their Sunday best, they don’t like it, because there’s a European influence, it’s cross-cultural, whereas the whole mythology of primitivism is purity. We want Africans to be purely African, we don’t want them to watch Bollywood movies, and we don’t want them dressed in polyester or nylon. But this is the heterogeneous world of Modernity that photography makes visible to us. So it’s the concept of appropriation that we can extract from specific examples. Which is not to say that you can appropriate anything, anything you want to be, which is, again, egocentric, and that’s a common misinterpretation I think many practitioners make, because it means that that contest over meaning has not been grasped in social as well as formal terms.

NR: I guess what I was driving at was who those curators are now, are now Maori, are now indigenous, are now African, and that’s changed things as well as appropriation.

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KM: It has changed things, but it’s made things all the more complicated. Because when Autograph ABP, a black institution, is presenting material from the archive – are they exploiting it? Are they commodifying it for their own purposes? Just because they’re black does that mean it’s okay? In other words, the questions about who decides, what criteria and the need for a public sphere of debate is more urgent because there are indigenous curators, because there are indigenous artists and postcolonial artists in the institutions making decisions. It’s not a black-white issue, in which you can characterize the ‘bad white European person’ who was buying into the primitivist mythology.

Postmodernism has universalist implications for everyone, because everyone has the opportunity to think about how their identity is constructed. If your great-grandfather was a slave trader, does that mean that genetically you must follow in that line? Or does modernity mean that you have a choice – that you can pick and choose those aspects of your own narrative and your family’s narrative that should be carried forward? So we’re all in it together and I think that simplistic binary was often reinforced by indigenous and minority movements themselves, in order to get heard, in order to get into the institution by delivering a counter truth. And I think from 1920 to 1990 there were good grounds for that argument, but in the last 20 years it shifted, so we have a different politics of representation right now.

Laura Schuster [from the audience]: I was quite intrigued by your suggestion that through this sort of delayed appreciation of the non-canonical archive we might be simply getting Afro vintage or something like an ethical redemption, I think you said, with an aesthetic aura. And I was wondering if you intended this slightly tongue in cheek as well, or if you truly feel that there can be such a thing as an aesthetic redemption of the hauntedness of the archives that we have and that we just don’t know what to do with.

KM: ‘Afro vintage’ was meant tongue in cheek. I mean, you look at contemporary culture; it’s completely locked into nostalgia. Some people take the view that modernism was about the future, whether it is the futurists or the constructivists, they had a belief in a better world to come, which postmodernists rejected, or said was no longer available. And some people take the view that when your entire culture is built on credit you’ve already made the future completely predictable because you’re going to be paying off for what you’ve borrowed. So maybe that’s one reason why so much contemporary culture is built around nostalgia. We all know songs of the seventies and so on.

And that’s actually evolved in an interesting ideological manoeuvre, which is the selective erasure what it was really like; let’s say in the 1970s. So we have the kitschy flares, and the Afro, and the music – all the good stuff. But the official narrative is not about the condition of de-industrialization which gave rise to punk for example. So in Britain, what makes Britishness marketable is a certain narrative in which contemporary art has to be referenced and linked to punk rock in the 1970s. Yet such nostalgia does not talk about unemployment, de-industrialization, the whole thing that made punk so desperate and nihilistic. So ‘Afro vintage’ is, I think, an aesthetic that some would like to buy into in order to trade on the market place and good luck to them, you know, you can pay money and take your choice.

I think the alternative is not so much that redemption is actually possible, although redemption is a very interesting word, because we think of it in theological terms – the redeemer – but it actually comes from the market place. To redeem means to buy back, you know – when you have empty bottles, empty beer bottles and you take them back to the shop and you get money. So it’s a word that belongs both to the most spiritual discourses of the afterlife and so on, but also the most base discourse of buying and selling. And I think that the philosophy of history that I am trying to tap into is one where Walter Benjamin is a good guide for postcolonial thinking. Not necessarily because he is Jewish, not because he was a Marxist, but because he had this understanding that the past is not finished, it doesn’t disappear into non-being. And that’s very similar to the Freudian notion of trauma. The trauma is not an experience – it’s something that was never experienced because the person shut down their capacity for sensation in order to survive a life-threatening event. So, one of the ways we have of representing that is the flashback in cinema, the idea of an involuntary memory that takes possession of consciousness. It’s not that I have conscious recall and I can just go into this story system and pick and choose what was I doing in October 1976. The traumatic event is still throbbing away, it has a residual potency that it can come back and grab you from the past. And that’s what Freud, with his work on shellshocked soldiers from the First World War was addressing in ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ [first published in German as Jenseits des Lustprinzips in 1920].

So I’m excited about the next stage, taking it to the next level, in which we look at the archival material with the care and attention that it demands. I’m very worried that we’re looking at it instrumentally and people are saying what can I get out of it, where’s the pay off? And there’s also kind of subjective pay off of nostalgia and a kind of warm, feel good factor. And it’s understandable that contemporary people of colour want to buy into that too, they should have that choice. But I think there’s something more and I’m really anxious that it’s going to get eaten up by the fashion cycle and in five years time it will just be a trend ‘We did Afro vintage, now we’re going to move on to East European photography and let’s look for something that might be worth rediscovering or repositioning there.’ Maybe I’m being a bit cynical, rather than tongue in cheek, but I think there’s an opportunity to tell a much bigger story that’s using the idea of redemption as a starting point.

—

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12.40 q&a with hulleah tsinhnahjinnie & kobena mercer [excerpts] Farid Tarbarki: Hulleah, what I found interesting about what you said is, you were really strict on your audience – ‘my audience is my community.’ Could you elaborate a bit on that, why is primarily your audience your community?

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie: Thinking back on my youth and that there weren’t a lot of positive or informative images and I had to go searching for them. So I want to make these images available to the younger generation.

FT: And could you imagine having a new audience, a different audience?

HT: No FT: And what’s the impact on your community by making this kind of work. Not only you of course, but also other artists – what are you getting back, what’s happening?

HT: Love.

FT: Love? How do you know?

HT: Affirmation and love. Take for instance, I was given an example of affirmation – because I don’t look for affirmation on the outside, because I saw too often many indigenous artists doing that, and they’re searching for something that isn’t there. But making these images for my community, making images, portraits of our famous people, our leaders; for instance of Wilma Mankiller [the first female chief of the Cherokee Nation] I took a portrait that she loved and when she passed last year she used it for her funeral. That is the highest affirmation I could ever receive.

— FT: Kobena, Hulleah just said that she works for her community. She would like to give back images and representations through the medium. You said in the book you wrote that the most important decision a black artist has to take is what kind of audience he or she is going to address. Why is that the most important decision to make?

Kobena Mercer: Where are you quoting from? I don’t recognize that as something I said. Sorry it’s a bit out of context.

FT: Sorry, it’s out of context, so adjust me – is it an important decision at all, when it comes to the audience you try to reach out to?

KM: Let’s think about audience, because we often think of the audience as a finite, knowable entity and what we’re talking about is a demographic. The audience is known by market research as an entity that can be accessed for a particular purpose, which is profit maximization. So institutions such as television, radio – they know what their audience is because they know what their market is. An alternative concept of the idea of audience is public. When your work is presented to the public it’s impersonal, it means that it’s universally open to anyone who is going to make a commitment or enter into a contract to give attention to it. So this is a public institution in which anyone can come and see the work on the walls, and you are making a contract, a commitment to engage with it. The way in which the work travels in the public sphere means that it is responded to by more than one audience.

So I do have a problem with the idea of identifying an audience in monolithic terms, simply on the basis of ethnicity, because one of the strange paradoxes of mechanical reproduction is that when a photograph of your artwork gets shown in magazine pages, in newspapers, in print culture or on the web – you don’t have control over the public space through which it travels. And that can be multifaceted – it’s a good thing, it’s a bad thing. That’s why I use the metaphor of the orphan. Decontextualization means that we have orphaned images that in a sense are parented by members of the public who care for them. And to curate means ‘to look after.’ Curators are there to conserve and care for objects in their responsibility. And that’s, I think, an alternative to the consumer driven model which is deeply problematic. But I don’t think an audience can be made at all times equivalent to an ethnically defined community, I would have a difference there.

Jimini Hignett [from the audience]: My question has a bit to do with this issue of public, but also with what Kobena was saying about the worry that work will simply be subsumed into becoming a fashion or a product with an economic value as opposed to some other value. Is it maybe important to look at, instead of the issue of the public, to look at an artist – and I mean that in the kind of very broad sense that could include curators and other people dealing with artwork – to look at what the work is that you want the work to do, as opposed to the public that you want. So the work that the work is doing, that that’s the thing to keep an eye on as an artist, that’s the responsibility.

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FT: Hulleah is that something you relate to?

HT: Well I was just thinking, ‘public,’ ‘audience,’ I guess when I’m referring to audience I am more thinking of my community. I’m thinking of a community that is fairly broad and includes a network of indigenous artists, a community where we all are on the same page. You’ll need to have certain keys to get in, because if you don’t have the keys to read the images, if you don’t have the knowledge of protocol, if you don’t have the basic knowledge, well you can’t get in. It’s simply that.

And not all of it is for the public, not all of it is for everybody’s eyes. Let’s take the ceremonies – we decide who comes in, we decide what goes out. People try to get in, they sneak recording devices in, they’re found out, you know, they’re taken care of. People think this is rough, but they’ve been told and you do not bring those recording devices into the ceremony or you’re not to participate in this. And people don’t like being told that.

And another area is that we’re often told if we can be artists. I can’t think of any other country than the United States where we have to prove we are native in order to present our artwork as Indian. And if you do not have the proper papers, you will be fined and if you keep on abusing and selling artwork without the proper papers you can be jailed.

— Henk Verburg [from the audience]: The history of photography here in our world is very much the western history of photography. Now we find out that there are different, other histories of photography also and the speakers this morning showed us something about those different histories. I was wondering, and this goes to all the speakers, if you think it’s better to rearrange or change our history of photography, or is it better to have different histories for different target groups, like the indigenous photographers? Or is it better to put everything we find out now in one history of photography?

HT: Well I mean, again, it comes back to reading the content, what can be photographed, protocols. It keeps on coming back to these things that are in place. So for us, and our nations, there needs to be a separate. I may sound like a separatist, and I am. Because our nations – and it goes back to this idea of sovereignty – our nations we are sovereign.

We have visual sovereignty, and we exercise that by having our own visual history.

KM: It’s such a huge question. I think there is a huge opportunity to understand that it’s a shared history. Modernity was planetary, so there is only one planet, which we manage to destroy by exploiting fossil fuels, but what we’re challenged to understand is how an infinite number of symbolic universes can be generated out of shared material. There’s only 26 letters in the English language, but the English language does not belong to the English people, because they went out into the world and as a result you have different versions of English. English is spoken in Australia, in Nigeria, in Barbados – differently. That’s the postcolonial breakthrough. The originator is not the owner.

So I even have a problem with the idea of ‘other histories’ because you are still segregating part of the universal. We’re challenged to understand how Europe and non-Europe have always been entangled. In that process of entanglement you have the possibility of transculturation, in which you can become who you are differently. And people often thought about that very literally in terms of mixed race populations, the Dutch have been in Ghana for over many years, there are people with a completely different skin colour in some regions and what’s the explanation to that? In the Modernist world order it was unthinkable, you don’t think about that, it’s a nasty little secret. And even the whole myth of purity, authenticity and essentialism meant that many black counter discourses didn’t want to deal with the mixed race subject, they didn’t want to deal with hybridity, creolization, synthesis. So I think there’s opportunity to think creatively about that, especially as we’re talking about a comparative model.

In many indigenous experiences of colonization your land is taken away from you, you’re dispossessed, made a stranger in your own territory. That’s very different in diaspora, where you are taken away from your land by those ships that take you across the middle passage. So just because they’re forms of colonization doesn’t mean that they’re identical. And I’m very excited about getting to the next level which is to get out of the north-south, black-white binary, because we have the concepts to do that, so that we can have a much more new and honest approach which is always cross cultural, is always comparative.

HT: The thing is that the sharing didn’t benefit us indigenous nations very well. Hospitality was abused. And sometimes it seems like the black and the white are the same through indigenous eyes.

—

208 symposium documentation performance

15.30 naro snackey (1980 nl) Performance in collaboration with Désirée Snackey: A performer rethinks herself through found images, incorporating the development process of a photographic sculpture.

Romantic Detachment: Jigsaw Histories That feeling I get in my studio, when I lay a portrait of 40x80 cm on the ground. Then the portrait looks in the direction of the ceiling, as if asleep, eyes open. Seen from the side, he appears to be staring, but it only looks as if the dark shine in his eyes remains. His lips are softly closed, resting on one another. They could fall open, but they don’t. I decide to saw a small gap in the face, with a 15 cm diameter. I place propellers there, which a helping hand can start spinning. Not enough for the portrait to lift off, but enough to create a shadow when the light comes from above. A shadow that will move across the face, while the propellers spin.

I look at him and he looks back. I touch him, but hesitate, then take my saw. I take his skin off. The image, which I own since it is in my studio, slowly loses his skin. I am really on top of the work. I see sparkles under its skin, and its pores, the image has a red shine to it.

I take some distance, remove my protective glasses, my dust mask, and my headphones. The machine has stopped running, the sound is gone, but my ears are still buzzing. He no longer looks at me, but I continue to look at him.

I notice that the image has slowly changed. He now has a real skin and is coming to life, I briefly think. Is he now more in the image, or did he sneak off? Did he know what I had in mind for him? I look at the image, he must have escaped. I need to get closer again, to catch him anew. I want him to face me again.

I’m staring at a group of people, I feel that I know them.

Perhaps from folklore. Weren’t these people in conflict with some other community? I replace some of their bodies. The heads I don’t touch. These are beautiful in their out of focus state. They have no more need for their own bodies, I give them new ones. New bodies that fit them better in all sorts of colours. I fit them with clearer costumes, to free them from telling that other story.

She looks at me, asking for my permission to step out of the image. Not now, if you don’t mind, she tells me. I’m here already anyway, am I not? Nonetheless I walk up to her, saw in hand. Her father stands jauntily next to her, with pride. He wears a moustache and a navy suit. Just like the rest of the photograph, his suit has a reddish tint. It pleases him, appearing in red. He seems to say: ‘We take good care of ourselves, for all the world to see.

Could you write that on the back for me please, in those firm block letters? In English please, so that everyone will understand.’ He says: ‘Just make the back side white, so that the letters come out better. I’ll just stand here, whatever you do. Letters or no letters. I’ll just stay put here, just like that. And the small one isn’t quitting the game either. But I feel that she’s aware that her age has caught up with her. Will you give her a hand, help her position herself?’

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She told me that she does not appreciate spontaneous visits. So I always ring the code that we arranged. Two soft rings, then I wait. If she is in I will see the curtains rustle, and in ten seconds time the door will open to let me in.

She is now in my studio. The spot where I am happy to meet people on my terms. She is printed on A0 size and surrounded by a beanstalk. The plant has taken its time growing like it did. It curls around and through her, obscures her head, and at the same time lends more body to her. This is exactly how I know her.

This hand that I can stare at infinitely, it’s lying under a scanner. An A4 scanner. It barely fits. I can hardly close the lid. Will have to wait and see how the scan turns out. For years I compared my hands to those of my family members. For form, size, roughness and for the grooves on the nails. I never found an identical match. I now compare my digital hand to a group portrait, a group of four. They are probably of the same family. They are lined up like domino tiles. I place my digital hand and the group portrait over one another. The hand now lies behind the group. The group is black and white, the hand is skin coloured. I remove the limbs and heads of the people. Their bodies wrapped in clothing remain upright, silhouettes. My hand gives them colour. The real body I add by chisel and saw. I hope the emptiness reflects the relation between the hand and the group portrait.

I observe their frozen faces. This old family photograph is a time document. A shutter time document. The fixed emotions can be read off their faces. They have managed to hold on to the twinkle in their eyes. How much of it is truthful, I wonder.

If I study them for a period of time they appear to blur, to become phantoms. They moved while the picture was taken. I mark the movements in saw cuts. I fix them with my saw so they won’t dare move anymore. Then I flip the image on its back so that the faces can rest, while they continue to watch, effortlessly.

[Originally performed in Dutch] There are websites where people can post notices if they want to research their family history. They add their ancestor’s portrait photos. The people in these photographs have disappeared. They are lost in and through the silence of our history. These portraits function as points of departure for the questions of their offspring.

Posting such a notice bears a resemblance to ritual acts.

A family’s offspring sacrifice pictures to this website, which functions as a temple and where people turn to for answers. Answers intended to help one position him/ herself in their own present. In making this exhibition I have faced such ‘desired histories’ because they also form part of my time and being. For that, I had to enter and desecrate the temple, separating the photographs from their altar. I needed to manipulate the pictures with my saw, in order to redeem them from their histories.

Collaboration: Naro Snackey and Désirée Snackey Concept and text: Naro Snackey Performer and text edit: Désirée Snackey English translation: Laura Schuster

Exhibited works p. 54

UNFIXED CONTRIBUTORS BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

226 contributors

Sara Blokland (1969 NL) is a visual artist, curator, researcher and writer with a specific interest in (conceptual) photography and film in relation to topics such as colonialism, identity and heritage.

She received a BFA from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), a MFA in photography from the Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam) and a MA in Film and Photographic Studies from the University of Leiden. Her MA thesis Photography framing poverty looked at the photographic production of images of poverty and ‘underdevelopment,’ analysing the photographic construction of the ‘non-Western subject in crisis’ in a colonial and postcolonial context.

Her work as a visual artist consists mainly of multimedia installations in which photography and film, as representations of (colonial) family heritage and identity, are being observed and analysed. Blokland’s films and photographic works have a strong focus on ‘the portrait’ and landscape as part of identity and memory. Sara Blokland was also the photographer and editor of the book Van Waarde [Of Value] (2008) and the photographer of the publication The Surinam Police Band (2009). Blokland’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums in the Netherlands including the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art Arnhem and Gemeentemuseum The Hague.

Internationally her work has been exhibited in venues such as Kumho Museum (Seoul, Korea) and Gallery Lmak-projects (New York).

Her work is part of several private and public collections, such as the ABN-AMRO Collection, the Rabobank Collection, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Gemeentemuseum The Hague. In the past ten years she has also been a (guest) lecturer at several art institutions and symposiums and advisor of photography projects and exhibitions.

Asmara Pelupessy (1981 US/NL) is an independent researcher, editor, writer, producer, curator and project manager working in photography and visual culture. She holds a BA from the University of California at Berkeley, with a self-designed interdisciplinary major in the Social History of Photography. She received her MA in Photographic Studies from the University of Leiden in 2010. Her master’s thesis examined the history of identification photography and contemporary vernacular and artistic subversions of its disciplinary frame. Interested in the photographic representation of identity, culture and heritage, Pelupessy enjoys working in and between the fields of contemporary art and documentary. Currently she is a researcher and producer for Paradox (NL), an organization developing photography, video and new media projects. She has also worked as a researcher for Kosmopolis, a Dutch organization that cultivates dialogue between diverse communities through art and culture. While completing her MA, Pelupessy was a researcher and editor for the first digital archive of World Press Photo’s

award-winning photographs. In Amsterdam she interned at NOOR photo agency, and, while in the San Francisco Bay Area, Pelupessy interned at the Independent Media Institute (AlterNet) and the International Museum for Women (IMOW). At IMOW she was a Submissions Manager for the publication Imaging Ourselves: Global Voices from a New Generation of Women (2006), presenting the art and writing of 105 young women from 57 countries. Before moving to the Netherlands, she was Associate Producer and Project Coordinator for the educational film and companion curriculum My People Are… Youth Pride in Mixed Heritage (2006).

Charif Benhelima (1967 BE) Belgian artist Charif Benhelima lives and works in Antwerp. Benhelima investigates the notion of identity, memory, oblivion, document and truth through images that explore perception, time and space, and a sense of invisibility. He received his MFA from the Higher Institute Sint Lucas (Brussels), Laureate at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts (Antwerp) and graduated in Documentary Photography at the International Center of Photography (New York). Benhelima was nominated for the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography 2008 (Harvard University/Peabody Museum) and has been an artist in residence at the Cité internationale des Arts (Paris), Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin) and Kamp Kippy 2010 (A.S.A.P, Mount Desert Island, ME, US).

Lizza May David (1975 DE) Visual artist Lizza May David, born in Quezon City in the Philippines, presently lives and works in Berlin. She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, École des Beaux Arts de Lyon and University of Arts Berlin.

She works on issues of migration, memory and nationhood, relating to her Filipino and German experiences. Therein she is interested in strategies of image production and questions of representation and display. Selected videos and projects include Relearning my Mother Tongue (project 2004-2009), The Model Family Award (installation and video 2008) and Cycles of Care (documentary 2011), a collaboration with Claudia Liebelt about Filipina Care Worker returnees from Israel. Since 2007 David is a member of the artist group Global Alien.

Quinsy Gario (1984 Cu/SM) Quinsy Gario (T. Martinus) is, among other things, a poet and artist. In 2009 he graduated from the University of Utrecht in Theater, Film and Television Studies with a specialization in Postcolonial Studies and Gender Studies. He was awarded the Hollandse Nieuwe Theatermakers Prize 2011. The same year, Gario released his first publication, titled The Bearable Ordeal of the Collapse of Certainties.

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Kaddu Wasswa John (1933 UG) Kaddu Wasswa John is a farmer and anti HIV/ AIDS activist. He runs his NGO Turn To Tea from his home in Mayirikiti, Mokono District (Uganda).

Among many other things, Kaddu Wasswa John has founded the first youth club in Uganda, penned dramas and social critique, served as civic leader in Ngogwe, Nyenga and Njeru town councils and been a rural community educator and activist on human rights, public health, food security and environmental issues.

Arthur Conrad Kisitu (1975 UG) Arthur Conrad Kisitu is a designer, poet, dancer and full time photographer. Kisitu is a selftaught artist, with an emphasis on story telling as a means of creating awareness and solving problems. He was born in Uganda, and lives and works in the capital Kampala. He holds a Bachelors degree in Business Administration from Makerere University. His work highlights the link between HIV, war and poverty. Sweet Home Uganda (SHUGA) is a charity initiative he started to address these challenges.

Terry Kurgan (ZA) Terry Kurgan is an artist and curator, based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Interested in the confluence of public and private realm issues and spaces, she runs an active studio and social sphere practice, working across a diverse range of fields, media and projects. For many years, her work has engaged with the rapid transformation of Johannesburg’s inner city. These projects have been sited in spaces as diverse as a maternity hospital, a public library, a popular Johannesburg shopping mall, an inner city park and a prison. She has been awarded numerous prizes and grants, and has exhibited and published broadly in South Africa and internationally. Her artistic interest over many years has been in photographs as material for interpretation, and in the complex and paradoxical nature of all photographic transactions. This year Fourthwall will publish a book on her Hotel Yeoville project, which engaged with the largely refugee and migrant population of a pan-African Johannesburg suburb through a range of digital, interactive, online and social media platforms.

Sandim Mendes (1986 NL) Sandim Mendes is a visual artist born and raised in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. There, she received her BFA from the Willem de Kooning Academy in 2010. In 2009 she was a participant in the exchange program at the Otis College of Art and Design (Los Angeles, California). In her work Mendes explores photography through a mixed media practice whereby she investigates identity in and between various cultures. Her work engages strong social aspects as she draws inspiration from her direct surroundings and living conditions. Since her graduation in 2010 her work has been shown in multiple venues in the Netherlands and Europe.

Kobena Mercer (1960 UK) Kobena Mercer is Professor of History of Art and African American Studies at Yale University and his work examines African American, Caribbean, and Black British artists in modern and contemporary art. He is the author of key texts in visual culture and has an international research profile in cultural studies. Since his first book, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural Studies (1994), Mercer has contributed to catalogues such as Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire (1995) and Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic (2010) along with artist monographs on Isaac Julien, Renee Green, Rotimi Fani-Kayode, among others. Mercer’s articles have been published in magazines such as frieze, Artforum International and Camera Austria. He was series editor of Annotating Art’s Histories, whose titles include Cosmopolitan Modernisms (2005), Discrepant Abstraction (2006), Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (2007) and Exiles, Diasporas & Strangers (2008).

Yamini Nayar (1975 US) Nayar is a photo-based artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Nayar’s work explores cultural memory and representation via combined means of sculpture, installation and photography. Nayar holds a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from School of Visual Arts (New York), where she was a recipient of the Aaron Siskind Memorial Scholarship. In 2010, Nayar was invited to give the Lightborne Lecture at the Cincinnati Art Museum, and held artist residencies at the Art Academy of Cincinnati and the Center for Photography (Woodstock). Nayar’s work has been exhibited with Thomas Erben Gallery (New York), Art Basel (Switzerland), Saatchi Gallery (UK), Gallery Experimenter (Kolkata), Galerie Anne Barrault (France), Queens Museum of Art (New York), ExitArt (New York) and the Cincinnati Art Museum, and has been reviewed in The New Yorker, The New York Times, ArtIndia Magazine and The Guardian, amongst others. Nayar’s work is included in numerous private and public collections, including the Saatchi Collection, Queens Museum of Art, and the Cincinnati Art Museum. Nayar is currently an artist-in-residence with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, New York, and a Visiting Artist Scholar with New York University Steinhardt School of Art. Otobong Nkanga (1974 NG/FR) Visual artist and live performer Otobong Nkanga, works in a broad spectrum of media including installations, photography, drawings and sculpture. Nkanga began her art studies at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife, Nigeria, continued at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, as well as the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Additionally, she received a Masters in the Performing Arts at Dasarts (Amsterdam). Her

work has exhibited widely internationally and her recent shows include: The Altered Landscape, Nevada Museum of Art (Reno Nevada), Marklinworld, Kunsthalle KAdE (Amersfoort, the Netherlands), All we ever wanted, Center of Contemporary Arts (Lagos), Outres Measures and Radio Programmes, La Galerie, Centre d’art Contemporain (Noisy-le-Sec, France) ARS 11, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art (Helsinki) and Faites comme chez vous, Raw Material Company (Dakar).

Pamela Pattynama (1958 NL) Pamela Pattynama is Research Officer on HERA/PhotoCLEC IP ‘Indies Images of the Colonial Everyday in a Multi-ethnic Postcolonial Society’. She is Indisch Huis Professor of Colonial and Postcolonial Literature and Culture History, specialized in the Dutch East Indies. She also teaches film studies and literary studies at the University of Amsterdam. Pattynama has published widely on (post)colonial discourse and the representation of gender and mixed race in Dutch (post)colonial films and literature. Another focal point in her research is the formation of identities and memory in migrant communities.

She is currently working on a book on postcolonialism and cultural memory in literature, photography and film.

Keith Piper (1960 UK) Keith Piper is a visual artist, curator, researcher and academic. Currently, he is a Reader in Fine Art and Digital Media at Middlesex University (London). He graduated with a BA (hons) in Fine Art from Trent Polytechnic (Nottingham, England), received his MA in Environmental Media from the Royal College of Art (London), and received an Honorary Doctor of Arts from the University of Wolverhampton (England).

Over the past thirty years, Piper works has made frequent use of (photo) archives and created new critical and creative perspectives on dominant historical narratives through interactive digital works, installations and film. In the 1980s he was a founding member of the BLK Art Group, a group of influential conceptual artists, painters, sculptors and installation artists based in the United Kingdom and noted for the boldly political stance of their work and exhibitions.

Piper currently lives and works in London.

Habda Rashid (UK) Habda Rashid is currently working as a research assistant at the Whitechapel Gallery (London), on the Gallery’s annual Bloomberg Commission, The Past was A Mirage I’d Left Far Behind, by American artist Josiah McElheny. She completed her MA in Curating Contemporary Art at London Metropolitan University and the Whitechapel Gallery, for which she was awarded the John Cass Scholarship. During her studies, Rashid worked on projects with the Government Art Collection (UK) and the Lord Mayor’s residence, Mansion House, organising exhibitions and talks with artists including Charles Avery, Mark

228 contributers

Titchner and Martin Westwood. With training from the London College of Printing, Rashid previously worked as a photographer initiating and researching her own socially engaged projects and exhibitions that include Lunch Group (2006) and Castle Market (2008). Her photographic work centered on people, often capturing her subjects within their daily routines.

She found the challenge in her work was to halt the moments of the everyday and create images that, through their visual language, induce a broader scope of reflection. During her time as a photographer she received four Arts Council individual Artist Awards and was supported by Olympus Photography. Her photographs are held in archive at Gunnersbury Park Museum and Sheffield City Council.

Natalie Robertson (NZ) Natalie Robertson (Ngati Porou, Clan Donnachaidh) is a photographic artist and writer on photographic theory who explores Maori knowledge practices and cultural landscapes. A Senior Lecturer at AUT University (Auckland), she received an MFA (First Class Honours) from the University of Auckland. Robertson’s practice engages with conflicting settler and indigenous relationships to land and place. In addition to her individual art practice, Robertson is a member of Local Time, a collective of four that instigate inter-institutional and inter-cultural collaborative projects that work between site/place and digital-media. In 2007, she also founded ‘Nga Kaiwhakaahua – The Photographers,’ a collective of seven Maori photographers. She has exhibited extensively in public institutions throughout New Zealand and internationally and her work is held in numerous collections.

Naro Snackey (1980 NL) Naro Snackey is a visual artist working mainly with the medium of photography. She studied in the Netherlands at the Art Academy (Den Bosch) where she received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and was an artist-in-residence at the Rijksakademie (Amsterdam) and LIA (Leipzig).

Exhibited internationally, Snackey’s unique, and often expansive sculptural and collage based works incorporate photography, simultaneously deconstructing and reconstructing images and their positions in time and space.

Andrea Stultiens (1974 NL) As Andrea Stultiens describes, ‘she does things with photographs. She makes them, collects them, looks at them, thinks and writes about them, and sometimes she makes the results of this visible for the rest of the world. Books are Stultiens’ favourite medium to present her work. They give her the opportunity to tell the story in an intimate way, literally one on one with the reader.’ Stultiens studied photography at Utrecht School of the Arts, received her Master of Photography from Art Academy AKI | ST Joost and her MA in Film and Photographic studies from the University of Leiden, both in

the Netherlands. Currently she is a Lecturer at in Photography at Academy Minerva (Groningen) and the Royal Academy of Art The Hague, in the Netherlands. In recent years her work has been shown internationally at venues such as the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Siskind Gallery (Rochester), the Lagos Photo Festival and Noorderlicht Photo Festival.

Armajani, Emily Jacir, Reena Saini Kallat, Laleh Khorramian and Shilpa Gupta. As winner of the Winter 2010 Lori Ledis Curatorial Fellowship, Vali presented Accented at Brooklyn’s BRIC Rotunda Gallery (2010) and he recently edited Manual for Treason, a multilingual publication commissioned

by Sharjah Biennial X (2011). He lives between Brooklyn (US) and Sharjah (UAE).

Hank Willis Thomas (1976 US) Hank Willis Thomas is a photo conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to identity, history and popular culture. He is the winner of the first ever Aperture West Book Prize for his monograph Pitch Blackness, received his BFA from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, and his MFA in photography, along with an MA in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco. He has exhibited in galleries and museums including the Studio Museum, Harlem (New York), The Andy Warhol Museum (Pittsburg, Pennsylvania), the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History and National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.) and PS1 (Queens, New York).

In 2007 he received the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award and the Tribeca Film Institutes New Media fellowship. In 2011 he became a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and Artist in Residence at Cité des Arts de Paris.

Rattana vandy (1980 KH) Born in Phnom Penh, Rattana Vandy photographs his native Cambodia with a devotion to creating documents that elucidate the hidden realities of contemporary Cambodian existence, while creating a more comprehensive historical record for future Cambodians as well as international audiences. As a founding member of the artist collective Stiev Selepak/ Art Rebels, Vandy opened Phnom Penh’s first artist-run exhibition space, SaSa Gallery (2009) and experimental art space Sa Sa Art Projects (2010). A selection of exhibitions include: Between Utopias and Dystopias, Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, 2011), The Bomb Ponds, SA SA BASSAC (Phnom Penh, 2011) and Hessel Museum (New York, 2010), Fire of the Year, The 6th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT6, Brisbane, 2009), Chobi Mela V International Photography Festival (Dhaka, 2009), Walking Through, Sa Sa Art Gallery, (Phnom Penh, 2009), Forever Until Now, 10 Chancery Lane (Hong Kong, 2009), Strategies from Within, Ke Center for Contemporary Art (Shanghai, 2008), and Another Asia, Noorderlicht Photo Festival (the Netherlands, 2006). His exhibition The Bomb Ponds was selected by the ArtAsiaPacific Almanac as one of top ten museum exhibitions for 2010. Vandy’s work is included in the collections of the Singapore Art Museum and the Queensland Art Gallery.

Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie (1954 Diné Nation/US) Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie is an artist, photographer and curator. She was born into the Bear Clan of the Taskigi Nation, and born for the Tsinajinnie Clan of the Diné Nation. Currently she is Director of the C.N. Gorman Museum at University of California Davis and Associate Professor in the Department of Native American Studies at University of California Davis. Exhibited nationally and internationally, Tsinhnahjinnie claims photography and video as her primary languages.

Creating fluent images of Native thought, her emphasis is art for Indigenous communities. She has been a recipient of the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art, a Chancellor’s Fellowship at the University of California Irvine, the First Peoples Community Artist Award, and a Rockefeller artist in residence. In 2009 Tsinhnahjinnie was co-editor of the book Visual Currencies: Reflections on Native Photography, together with Henrietta Lidchi.

Murtaza Vali (1974 IN) Murtaza Vali is a writer, art historian and curator. He received an MA in Art History and Archaeology from New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts in 2004 and is currently a Visiting Instructor at Pratt Institute. He is a contributing editor for Ibraaz.org and ArtAsiaPacific, and was co-editor of the 2007 and 2008 ArtAsiaPacific Almanac issue. He also writes regularly for Artforum.com, ArtReview, Art India and Bidoun and has penned monographic essays on Siah

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Walker, Ranginui. Kawhawhai tonu matou – struggle without end. Auckland: Penguin, 1990.

Symposium Documentation Benhelima, Charif. Welcome to Belgium.

Antwerp: Ludion, 2003.

Groys, Boris. ‘Topology of contemporary art.’

In Antinomies of Art and Culture: Modernity, Postmodernity, Contemporaneity. Edited by Terry Smith, Okwui Enwezor and Nancy Condee. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2008.

Decarava, Roy and Langston Hughes. Sweet Flypaper of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955.

Hall, Stuart, ed. Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.

London: Sage Publications, 1997. hooks, bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. New York: The New Press, 1995.

Rux, Carl Hancock. ‘Eminem: The New White Negro.’ In Everything but the Burden: What White People are Taking from Black Culture.

Edited by Greg Tate. New York: Harlem Moon, 2003.

Stultiens, Andrea, Kaddu Wasswa John and Arthur c. Kisitu. The Kaddu Wasswa Archive.

Rotterdam: Post Editions, 2010.

Thomas, Hank Willis. Pitch Blackness. New York: Aperture, 2008.

index 231

advertising, 8-9, 27, 168, 199 Africa, 193, 199, 202-03, 214, 215

North, 185, 219 African American

males, 9, 168

photography, 198 African Americans, 9, 27, 168, 198, 213 African(s), 77, 120, 139, 204, 213, 217 African studio photography, 73, 78, 79, 190-91 Afrique Par Elle Meme [exhibition], 73 Afro vintage, 191, 194 Agee, James, 76 alienation, 75, 97, 118, 175 America, 198 American(s), 91, 213 American Negro Exhibit [exhibition], 73 amnesia, 191, 222

public, 129

settler, 210 Amsterdam, 219 ancestor(s), 99-100, 209 ancestral carvings - see carvings Andre, Carl, 75 Angolan contemporary art, 175 anthropology, 6, 43, 72, 127, 170

reverse-, 174

visual, 64

see also ethnographic, ethnography, portraits anthropometric

classification, 64

photography, 219 apartheid, 211

post-, 174

pre-, 79 appropriation, 7, 77, 102, 169, 179, 193, 198, 211 Aotearoa, 97-98, 188, 205 Arab-Sephardic background, 21 archaeologist, 63, 65, 199 architecture, 98-99, 114, 150, 205 archive(s), 7, 8, 52, 63, 65-67, 73-74, 77-79, 102, 114, 127, 129-30, 134-5, 140, 170, 179, 182, 190-91, 193-94, 205, 214, 216, 218-19, 222 - see ­digital

personal, 183 - see photographic

vernacular, 8 - see virtual - see Western

see also IWI Collection archival - see evidence

images, 21, 79, 175

material, 77, 79, 82, 194

research, 73, 190 art(s)

anti-, 75

conceptual, 73-76, 190

contemporary, 6, 73-74, 77, 79, 166, 178, 181,

190, 194, 205, 210

Dutch, 67

institution of, 77 – see institutions

Islamic, 149

Pop- see Pop Art

post-black, 175

twentieth century, 74-75, 191

see also museums artefact(s), 8, 63, 172, 179, 214, 218, 219

digital, 67 art criticism, 74 art history, 9, 74, 77, 188, 193 artist(s) - see black - see indigenous

minority, 191

postcolonial, 77, 82, 194

postmigrant, 77

role of the, 174, 193, 212 - see trickster

Western view of, 102 artistic

value, 193

research, 7, 8, 62

theory, 181 art market, 174 art photography, 76, 191 Asia, 8, 127, 156, 222

South, 73 assimilation, 97-98, 129-30, 168 audience(s), 9, 74, 76, 77, 131, 132, 135, 168, 170, 174, 188, 191, 195-97, 212, 222 aura, 74, 76, 77, 78, 191, 194 Australia, 9, 188, 193, 197 authenticity, 64, 76, 134, 171, 197 authority, 63, 65, 99-100, 174 authoritarian(ism), 212 authorization to photograph, 99 author(ship), 6, 7, 49, 63, 74, 76-77, 79, 179, 191, 193, 216 autuerism, 77, 82 Baartman, Saartjie, 168 Bamako, 74 Barclay, Barry, 101, 102, 205 Barnor, James, 73, 82 Barthes, Roland, 76, 78-79, 82, 112, 174 Baudelair, Charles, 76 Bauhaus set design, 114 Bearden, Romare, 7 Belgium, 174, 185

see also colonialism belonging, 114, 129, 150, 168, 175, 217 Benhelima, Charif, 8, 9, 20-21, 166, 167, 179, 185

Black-Out, 21, 24-25, 167

Diggings, 24

Goal, 24

Minus Two, 25

Municipal Park Antwerp, 167

Off-street, 24

Permanent address, 25

Roots I, 167

Sea view, 25

Semites, 9, 21, 22-23, 167, 183 Benjamin, Walter, 76, 78-79, 112, 134, 193, 194 Benjouira, Helena, 185 Ben Shimon, Ohad, 174 Bergson, Henri, 147-49, 152 Bethlehem, Louise, 140 Biko, Steve, 169 binary, 152, 168, 194, 197, 198, 199

Birane, Diouf, 78 Birmingham, 77, 218 black, Black,

artist(s), 8, 63, 77, 175

body, bodies, 168, 198-99

Consciousness, 169

family narratives, 79

institution, 194

man, males, 43, 198

popular photography, 174

see also diaspora, post-black art Blackness, (blackness), 168, 179, 198-99 blacks in photography, 198 Blokland, Sara, 6, 62, 118, 120, 166, 178-79, 181, 182, 205, 212 BLK Art Group, 8, 43 body, the, 27, 43, 114, 156, 168, 172, 175, 209 Bochner, Mel

Actual Size (Hand), 75

Misunderstandings (A Theory of Photography), 75 bomb pond, 7, 89, 91 born-free, 174 boundaries

crossed, transcending, 66, 147

public/private, 79, 98, 222

between sacred and mundane, 103 Brazil, 203 Breitz, Candice, 175 Breman, Jan, 132 Britain (Great), 8, 62, 77, 194, 210, 218 British, (the) 79 - see also colonialism Brussels, 185 Buitenweg, Hein, 131 Burgin, Victor, 74

Photopath, 75

Possession, 75

UK76, 74 California, 181 Cambodia, 89-91 Canary Islands, 204 Canton, 128 Cape Verde, 8, 118, 120, 175 Carlyle, Jill, 101 Caribbean, (the), 218

Carnival, 63

subjects, 77 carving(s), 99-100, 103, 105, 193, 222

ancestral, 97 CBK, Center for Contemporary Art Dordrecht, 7, 8, 9, 62, 166, 178-79, 181, 219 CD-ROM, 43 ceremony(/ies), 97, 197, 205, 213 Certeau, Michel de, 130 Clark, Fiona, 101 classification, 6, 67

anthropometric, 64 collage, 7, 8, 43, 55, 120, 147-52, 156, 174, 185 colonial

campaigns, 114

critique, 213

discourse, 77

everyday, 130, 222 - see expansion

232 index

families, 127 - see gaze

history, histories, 6, 8, 43, 130, 134, 178, 181,

182, 183, 212

past, 128-29, 131-32, 222

photography, photographs, 77, 127-28, 134,

179, 205, 222

images, 134

Indonesia ­- see East-Indies

legacy, 8, 134

nostalgia, 7, 134

representations, 212

subjects, 6, 73, 191

trade routes, 74

of the United States, 188 colonized, (the), 193

body, 43 colonialism, colonization, colonial rule, 9, 43, 62, 73, 128, 168, 170, 181-82, 197, 205, 210, 211

Dutch, 127-28, 131

Belgian, 174

British, 97-98, 127, 205, 211

history of Photography under, 190 colony, colonies, 6

Dutch, 181

slave-holding, 218 commercial

landscape, 65

photographer(s), 97, 218

photography, 100

value, 74

see also advertising commercialization of photographs, 97, 103 commemoration, 129 community, 97, 103, 105, 139, 175, 181, 182, 188, 195-97, 203, 205, 208, 210, 211, 217, 218 - see Hopi community

local, 62, 105 - see memory

see also Indo-Dutch conceptual art – see art conceptualism, 74-75, 191

neo-, 77 Congo Free State, 174 Constitution Hill, 174 Constructivist(s), 194

set design, 114 control, 67, 139, 150

over representation, 7, 73, 97, 195, 212-13 copyright, 76, 102 creolization, 197 criminality, 66 criminology, 43, 72 cross-cultural modernity, 73 Crystal Palace, 114 cultural

codes, 98, 179, 205

context, 188, 213

habitus, 175

hegemony, 213

heritage, 134

identity, 6, 7, 9, 135, 174, 175, 178, 182

landscape, 65, 129

marker, 219

pride, 8 - see protocol

studies, 6, 7, 9, 73-74, 76, 166, 175, 190

type, 64

values, 97, 99 ­ see also trans-cultural, transculturation culture(s)

double, 118, 175 - see mass culture - see material culture - see national culture - see oral culture - see popular culture - see print culture - see visual culture curate, to, 195 curators, 6, 166, 179, 181, 193-94, 195 cyberspace, 188

see also digital, Internet, web Das, Samit, 150 David, Lizza May, 8, 156 Decarava, Roy, 198 decolonization, 131, 134-35, 182, 205-06 decontextualization, 74, 195

of photographs, 72, 169, 190, 195 Deleuze, Gilles, 152 Detroit, 114 Dieten, Ferdinand van, 193 diaspora, 7, 9, 149, 178-79, 181, 190, 197, 212, 213

black, 9, 199 digital

age, 134

archive(s), 8, 112 - see artefacts

image manipulation, 64, 134

images, 102

photographs, 134, 143

technology, 66, 79, 169, 170, 175, 209

transmission, dissemination, 72, 128 digitization, 134 displacement, 152, 172, 202-03, 211 document(s) - see identity

photographic, 64, 169 documentary

humanistic, 205

(and) photography, 7, 64, 72, 74, 79, 82, 101-02,

149, 156, 167, 174, 175, 182, 191, 210, 214

realism, 76-77 Dordrecht, 7-8, 62, 65-66, 166, 178-79, 181-82, 218 Du Bois, W.E.B., 73 Duchamp, Marcel, 75 Dutch - see colonialism

context, 8, 132, 182-83

culture, 6, 129, 131, 134, 183, 219

landscape, 66

society, 118, 175 Dutch-Indonesians, Indo-Dutch, 7, 55, 127, 129-30, 179, 222 Dutchness, 214 Dyche, Ernest, 77, 218 East Bengal, 114 East-Indies, (Dutch or Netherlands), 127-29, 131-32, 135, 222

Eckart, Günter, 156-58 Edwards, Elizabeth, 127 Eisenstein, Sergei, 174 Enwezor, Okwui, 73, 193 erasure, 79, 112, 194, 202, 222 Espi, Sara Rosa, 174 estrangement, 75 ethnicity, 27, 78, 168, 195 ethnographic museum, 63, 219

see also Tropenmuseum ethnography, 64

see also anthropolgy Europe, 72, 73, 174, 197 European

culture, 222

expansionism, 97

non-, 63

see also photographers Europeans, 127-28, 194 European House of Photography, 73 Evans, Walker, 76 Eveling, Stanley, 167 everyday, (the), 112, 114, 130, 139, 172, 198, 222 evidence, 7, 63, 72, 73, 91, 101, 127 exoticism, 8, 132, 156, 174 expansion(ism), 205

colonial, 134

European, 97 family, families, 27, 35, 120, 127-30, 139, 140, 149, 152, 194, 202, 209

album, 78-79, 82, 105, 114, 129, 134, 156

history, 209, 212, 222

identity, 114

mixed, 127

photograph(s), 7, 21, 134-35, 147, 209, 211, 222

snapshots, 114, 130, 222

tree, 215 Fani-Kayode, Rotimi, 7 Feyder, Sophie, 174 film(s), 8, 78, 101, 102, 114, 131, 132, 134, 175, 193, 205, 218, 222 Finn, Tasha, 174 Fisher, Jean, 77 foreigner, 120, 156, 185 Fosso, Samuel, 193 found

image(s), 79, 112, 118, 179, 208, 222

photographs, 21 frame(s), 55, 79, 147, 149-52, 199

(photographic), 49, 156 Freestyle [exhibition], 175 French colonial rule, 127 Freud(ian), 79, 194 Friedlander, Marti, 101-02 Fusari, Massimiliano, 174 Garfield, Rachel, 170 Gario, Quinsy

Victorius Failures, 15 gaze, (the), 35, 97, 114, 156, 219

classifying, 63

colonial, 73

photographic, 66 Ghana, 73, 82, 197 gender, 8, 27, 66, 77, 99, 212

index 233

genealogy, genealogical, 55, 79, 99, 205, 215, 222

see also ancestors, family Germany, 156, 211 globalization, 132, 174, 191 God, 193 Golden, Thelma, 175 Golpinar, Ozkan, 9, 181, 213 Gomez-Pena, Guillermo, 174 Green, Renee, 7 Greenberg, Clement, 74, 75 Groys, Boris, 191 Guggenheim Museum, 73 Gupta, Latika, 150 Gyatso, Gonkar, 174 Halbwachs, Maurice, 129 Hall, Stuart, 76, 77, 182 Hamilton, Richard

Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes

So Different. So Appealing, 114 Hammons, David, 63 Hanly, Gil, 101 Harlem (New York), 175 hegemony, cultural, 213 Heinrich, Rosie, 174 Hesselink, Annabel, 175 heritage (public), 134-35, 174, 182 Hignett, Jimini, 195 Hilliard, John

Cause of Death, 76 history - see art history - see colonial - see family

from below, 130, 222

national, 128, 168

social, 7, 140, 174

linear, 6, 73, 222

philosophy of, 194 – see photographic, photography

white settler, 212 Holocaust, visual presentation of, 132 hooks, bell, 182 Hopi community, 213 hospitality, hosting, 98-100, 102, 188, 197, 212 Huebler, Douglas

Variable Piece #34, 74 Hughes, Langston, 198 Huxley, Thomas Henry, 64, 219 hybrid(ity), 6, 179, 197, 222 identification, process of, 78, 134 identity

collective, 129-30, 135, 174

documents, 21, 143

fixation of, 6 - see trans-cultural identity image/text

work, 75, 77, 79

relations(hip), 73, 74, 82, 169, 190, 191 immigrant(s), 118, 175, 185

African, 139

photographers, 128

see also migrant(s), migration immigration, 204 independence (national), 73, 190, 212

see also Indonesia indigenous

artist(s), 188, 194, 195, 197

photographers, 179, 188, 197 Indisch Wetenschappelijk Instituut (Indies Scientific Institute) – see IWI Collection Indonesia(ns), 134, 175

independence, 7, 127, 128, 131, 222

see also East Indies Indo-Dutch – see Dutch-Indonesians installation(s), (artworks), 8, 9, 43, 55, 134, 171, 172, 191, 222 institutions

art, 6, 74, 76, 77, 175, 181, 190-91, 193-84

national, 6, 134 intellectual property, 102 ­ see also copyright interactive work, 8, 43, 67, 218 Internet, the 102, 134, 143

see also cyberspace, web Iranian elections (2009), 175 Islamic art, 149 IWI Collection, 7, 127-35, 222 Jewish, 21 Johannesburg, 7, 139-40 John, Kaddu Wasswa, 179, 183, 214-16 Jordan, Michael, 199 Julien, Isaac, 7 Kabore, Issa, 78 Kafka, Franz, 78 Keita, Seydou, 73, 74, 77, 174, 193 Kerala, 114 King Leopold II, 174 King, Michael, 100 Kisitu, Arthur C., 179, 183, 214-17 Klitschko brothers, 199 knowledge (systems), 63-67, 219 Koepnick, Lutz, 132 Kousbroek, Rudy, 132 Kruger, Barbara, 77 Kurgan, Terry

Park Pictures, 7-8, 136 Kosuth, Joseph

Art as Idea as Idea, 75 Kuti, Fela, 211 Lamprey, John, 64, 219 landscape(s), 7, 49, 62, 65-66, 67, 90, 156-57, 172, 179, 202-04 language(s), 6, 66, 97, 102, 130, 168, 197, 213 Larsson, Erika, 175 In/sight: African Photographers from 1940 to the Present [exhibition], 73 Lasch, Christopher, 132 Leeuwen, Lizzy van, 131 Leiden, University, 181 Ligon, Glenn, 175

A Feast of Scraps, 79 London, 73, 218 Luanda, 175 Mankiller, Wilma, 195 Maori (culture and society), 7, 97-105, 205-06, 211, 212

photographers, 98, 101-03, 179, 205

self-determination, 97-98, 101, 205, 210 Maori Television Service Act, 101 Martinus, T. see Gario, Quinsy masquerade, 63-64, 219 material culture, 8 material turn, 127 mass culture, 76 Mbembe, Achille, 140 mechanical reproduction, 134, 195 Meessen, Vincent

Vita Nova, 78 melancholy, 79, 140 memory, memories, 78, 79, 112, 127-35, 147, 175, 194, 202-04, 211

collective, 114, 129

community(/ties), 129-30, 134

fictional, 8

photography and, 7, 21, 49, 66, 79, 114, 172,

179, 182-83, 202

personal, 7, 49, 129, 131, 222

prosthetic, 131

revision of, 152

redistribution of, 211

social, 179, 222

see also amnesia memorialization, 79, 112, 131 Mendes, Sandim, 8, 116, 118, 120, 175 Genoveva, 119

Januari, 121

Lucinda, 121

Pão pão, queijo queijo, 122-23 Rapazinho, 117 Rapazinhos, 124-25 Mercer, Kobena, 7, 9, 72, 166, 179, 181, 183, 190, 193-94, 195, 197, 212-13 mestizo, 127

see also hybrid, mixed race middle passage, 197

see also slavery Middlesex University, 219 migrant(s), 128, 132, 140, 175, 182

African, 139

archive, 134

Dutch, 131

Indies, 129, 134-35, 222

worker, 140 - see postcolonial

see also immigrants, postmigrant, Windrush generation migration, 6, 8, 21, 43, 62, 97, 139, 149, 174, 175, 183 Miller, John, 102, 210 mise en scène, 79 Mita, Merata, 101, 205 mixed race, 197

see also hybrid, mestizo mobility, 140, 175, 211 modernity, 9, 72-74, 76, 79, 179, 190-91, 193-94, 197 modernism, 74-77, 79, 114, 191, 193, 194 Mofokeng, Santu

The Black Photo Album/Look at Me,

1890-1950, 78, 79 Moluccas, 175 Moore, Henry, 193 multiculturalism, 6, 7, 9, 77, 132 175, 191

234 index

museum(s), 8, 61-65, 74, 77, 112, 131, 170, 174, 188, 191, 193, 214, 218-19

(contemporary) art, 73, 76, 190

virtual, 67

see also Tropenmuseum Namatjira, Albert, 193 national culture, 130 Native American(s), representation of, 35, 169 Nayar, Yamini, 8, 106, 112, 114

By a Thread, 114, 115 Cleo, 109, 114

Happen, 111

One of These Days, 110 Pursuit, 113

Under a Night Sky, 107 Nederlands Fotomuseum, 214 neo-conceptualism - see conceptualism Neshat, Shirin, 77, 191 Netherlands, the, 7-8, 62-63, 118, 127-29, 131-34, 166, 178-79, 181-83, 205, 216-17, 222 New Zealand, 97-98, 100-02, 188, 205-06, 210 New Zealand Film Archive, 102 New York, 73, 74, 199 Nga Kaiwhakaahua (The Photographers) the Aotearoa Indigenous Photographers Collective, 205 Ngilima, Ronald, 174 Nigeria, 156, 197, 202, 211 Njami, Simon, 73 Nkanga, Otobong, 8, 9, 48-49, 166, 172, 179, 183, 202, 210, 211

Alterscape Stories: Uprooting the Past, 49, 204

Delta Stories, 172

Dream in One Meter Square, 12

Memory of a Landscape, 9, 48-53, 183, 204

The state of amnesia, 203 Nieuwenhuys, Rob, 131 nostalgia, 78, 112, 114, 118, 120, 194, 222

tempoe doeloe, 128, 131-34 Nunavut, 188 Nuttall, Sarah, 140 Obama, Barack, 199 objectivity, 6, 63, 67, 128, 219 O’Connor, Terry, 101 Oguibe, Olu, 77 ‘Okhai Ojeikere, J.D., 211 Olin, Margaret, 78 Ondaatje, Michael, 82 oral culture, 101 outsider position, 63-64, 66, 182, 183, 219 Other, (the), 6, 82, 174, 175, 211, 212, 219

image of Africans as, 77

non-Western people as, 7, 73 otherness, 129, 174 ownership, 27, 75, 102, 174, 197, 199, 222 Pacific cultures, 103 Pakistan, 7, 147 Paris, 73 parody, 63, 65, 67, 174, 219 Passalacqua, Veronica, 188 Pattynama, Pamela, 7, 127, 179, 222 Pelupessy, Asmara, 6, 62, 118, 120, 166, 178, 18182, 205, 212 perception, 6, 21, 147-52

performance(s), 8, 9, 49, 120, 140, 172, 174, 179, 202, 208, 211, 212, 222 Philippines, 156-58 photo essay(s), 167, 174 photographic

access, 101

archive, 8, 179, 218

collection, 127, 134, 218 - see document - see gaze

history, 9, 188, 206

medium, 72-73, 82, 149, 172

practice(s), 7, 77, 97, 103, 128, 169, 205-06, 212 - see reproducibility

research, 179, 185

subject, 64

theory, 7, 179, 190

transactions, 140 photography - see African photgraphy - see African-American

anthropometric, 219 colonial

books, 129

commercial, 100

documentary, 101, 174, 182

ethnographic, 174

history, (ies) of, 73, 97, 182, 190-91, 197, 7, 9, 205-06 - see memory

portrait, 7, 73, 99, 128

studies, 73 - see studio photography

vernacular, 7, 9, 74, 77, 182, 190-91 photographer(s), 65, 97-105, 112, 156-57, 168, 185, 193, 199, 211, 212

commercial, 97

documentary, 214 - see indigenous - see Maori

police, 101

street, 7, 139-43

subject and, 64, 73, 77, 218 photojournalism, 76, 191 Pinney, Christopher Piper, Adrian, 7, 79 Piper, Keith, 7, 8, 42-43, 61-63, 153, 170, 179, 182-83, 218

A Future Museum of the Present, 8, 61, 63,

67, 170, 179, 183, 218-19 Fictions of Science, 43, 46-47, 183, 219

Go West Young Man, 42, 43, 44-45

Ghosting the Archive, 218

Lost Vitrines, 218

Relocating the Remains, 170 Poata, Tama, 101 Polaroids, 21, 167 polysemy, 73, 76, 190 Pop Art, 114 Pope L., William, 63 popular culture, 134, 174, 179, 198, 210 portrait(s), portraiture, 35, 64, 67, 73, 74, 78, 120, 139-40, 143, 156, 169, 174, 195, 208-09, 219

African studio, 73, 78

anthropological and ethnographic, 64

family, 171

photos, photography, photographs, 8, 97,

99, 128, 175, 222

self-, 120, 152

studio, 7, 77, 79, 82, 182, 190 positivism, 182 post 9/11, 66, 101 post-black art, 175 postcolonial

– see­ artists

breakthrough, 197

haunting, 79

identity formation, 7

migrants, 127-28, 130

Netherlands, 131, 134, 179, 222

politics, 191

politics of representation, 73

studies, 7, 179

theory, 76, 193

thinking, 194 postcolonialism, 6, 9, 190 postmigrant

artists, 77

photography, 73, 82 postmodernism, postmodernist, 74, 76-77, 191, 193-94 power, 63-65, 101, 127, 134, 174, 182-83, 198, 199, 212 print culture, 72, 195 private

memories, 128, 222

space(s), 99, 118, 127, 129, 175, 222

see also boundaries primitivism, 193 protocol(s), (cultural), 7, 99-101, 103, 188, 197, 205, 212 public

access, 134

amnesia, 129

commemoration, 129

heritage, 174

space, domain 118, 129, 175, 195-97, 222

see also boundaries punctum, 78-79, 174 race, 6, 8, 27, 43, 66, 77, 168, 181-82, 199

mixed, 197 Rashid, Habda, 7, 146 realism, 79, 147 - see documentary reciprocity, 103 recollection, 147, 152 Reinhardt, Kathleen, 175 refugees, 139, 185 remembrance, 74, 78, 175, 178 re-present(ation), 43, 66, 152, 169, 174 representation

humanistic, 212

mis-, 205, 210

politics of, 9, 190, 191, 194, 212

self-, 6, 8, 35, 73

system of, 182

see also control reproduction

electronic, 134

mechanical, 134, 195 reproducibility (of photography), 72, 76, 77, 212 reverse-anthropology - see anthropology

index 235

Roberts, John, 75 Robertson, Natalie, 7, 96, 179, 183, 188, 193, 205, 210-12

Tamateapokaiwhenua Pou-a-kani Marae,

Mangakino, 104 Robinson, Tjalie, 129-31, 222 Rosengarten, Ruth, 140 Rotterdam, 9, 118, 214 Rushdie, Salman, 132 Russian Formalists, 75 Rux, Carl Hancock, 198 scale, 49, 75, 112 Schuster, Laura, 194, 209 science, 6, 8, 43, 72, 79, 128, 130, 152, 203, 222 sculpture, 8, 43, 112, 114, 134, 171, 179, 208, 212, 222 Sebald, W.G., 82 self-representation - see representation self-determination, 8, 150, 152, 182 - see Maori Selwyn, Don, 101 semiotic(s), 64, 75, 76, 134 set design, 114 sexuality, 127 Sher-Gil, Amrita, 79 Sher-Gil, Umrao Singh, 79 Sherman, Cindy, 193 Sidibé, Malik, 174 Siegert, Nadine, 175 Siencnik, Nataša, 175 Simone, AbdouMaliq, 139 Simpson, Lorna, 77

Photo Booth, 79, 80-81 Sitanala, Atêf, 175 skin, 208, 222

colour, 197, 198, 209, 214 slavery, 27, 43, 73, 127, 174, 194, 199, 203, 211, 218-19

see also middle passage Smith, Huhana, 98 Snackey, Désirée, 179, 208-09 Snackey, Naro, 8, 9, 54-55, 134, 166, 171, 179, 183, 208-09, 210-12, 222

Jigsaw Histories, 208-09

Romantic Detachment, 54-59, 183, 208-09 snapshot(s), 79, 114, 128, 130, 156, 167, 222 social biography, 127, 130, 134, 135, 222 South Africa, 139, 143, 174 sovereignty, 6, 101, 197, 212

see also visual sovereignity Sontag, Susan, 149, 150 spiritual world, 97-100, 102-03, 203 Sreberny-Mohammadi, Leili, 175 stereotypes, 27, 120, 168, 169, 174 Stevens, Ambrose Naqeeb, 175 street photographers, - see photographers Studio Museum, 175 studio photography, 7, 9, 64, 73, 77-82, 128, 174, 182, 190 Stultiens, Andrea, 179, 183, 214, 216, 217 surveillance, 66, 72, 101 Sundaram, Vivan, 79 Sweet Home Uganda (SHUGA), 217 Symes, Sally, 101 Szeeman, Harald, 75

Tarbarki, Farid, 183, 195, 197, 210-11, 217 Tasman, Abel, 205 tempo doeloe, 131

see also nostalgia Terrorism Suppression Act, 101 third space, 82 Thomas, Hank Willis, 8, 26-27, 166, 168, 179, 183, 198-99, 210, 213, 219

Are you the right kind of woman for it?, 26, 32

Branded, 8, 26, 27, 28-30, 168

The Curious in Ecstasy, 168

Exxon Black Street Art, 27, 31

The Johnson Family, 33

Priceless #1, 26, 28-29

Scarred Chest, 30

Smokin’ Joe Ain’t Jemama, 26

The Truth is I am You, 168

Unbranded: Reflections in Black by

Corporate America 1968-2008, 26-27, 27,

31-33, 168, 199 Tibetan culture, 174 time(-keeping), linear, 77, 152, 172 time traveller, 66 Tollens, H.J., 66-67 Tong Tong, 129, 131, 222 tourism, 7, 128, 156, 158, 169, 188, 214 trans-cultural identity, 149 transculturation, 197 trauma, 129, 170, 194 travel writing, 66 trickster, tricksterism, trickery, 63, 179, 218, 219 Tropenmuseum, 134, 219 Tsinhnahjinnie, Andrew, 35 Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah, 8, 34-35, 166, 169, 179, 183, 188, 195, 197, 205, 211, 213

Bloodlines, 35

Che-bon, 40

Dad, 38 Grandchildren, 39 Istee-cha-tee Aspirations, 41

Photographic Memoirs of an Aborginal

Savant (Living on Occupied Land), 34, 35,

36-37

Portraits Against Amnesia, 35, 35, 38-41 Tuhiwai Smith, Linda, 101, 205 Uganda, 179, 213, 214-17 United States, (US), 6, 7, 90, 118, 120, 168, 169, 181, 188, 197, 197, 199 United Kingdom (UK), 147-49

see also Britain uncanny, the, 112, 114 Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art [exhibition], 218 unfixed, 73, 182, 212 UNFIXED Projects, 8, 9, 166, 178 unheimlich – see uncanny unknown, 8, 66, 82, 128, 129, 156, 191

subjects, 78

photographers, 101 unknowability, 74, 222 Universal Exposition (1900), 73 Vali, Murtaza, 8, 112, 114 Van Der Zee, James, 7

Family Portrait, 78

Vandy, Rattana, 7, 86, 89-90

Kandall II, 94-95

Kompong Cham, 93

Kompong Thom, Sambor Prey Kuk, 92

Rattanakiri I, 87

Rattanakiri II, 84-85

Takeo, 88 Vanvugt, Ewald, 132 Verburg, Henk, 197 Verfremdung, 75 verisimilitude, 75, 76, 79 Venice, Italy, 149 Versendaal, Yvonne van, 181 Victoria and Albert Museum, 218 video, 43, 120, 174, 175 Vietnam War, 90 Viola, Bill, 77, 191 violence, 131, 212 virtual

archive, 67

museum(s), 67

photomontages, 79 (in)visibility, 82, 102, 140, 182, 183 visual anthropology – see anthropology visual culture, 7, 134, 166, 169, 199, 210 visual sovereignty 7, 35, 179, 182, 188, 197, 205 Walker, Ranginui, 97 war, 7, 97, 128-29, 175, 194, 202

crimes, 131

see also Vietnam War web, online, 35, 72, 79, 188, 195

see also cyberspace, Internet Weems, Carrie Mae, 77 Wells, H.G., 66 Western

archives, 73

art history, 188

history of photography, 197 Where Three Dreams Cross: 150 Years of Photography from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh [exhibition], 73 white

Dutch elite, 131

males, men, 44, 198, 199

settler history, 212 whiteness, 198 Whitechapel Gallery, 73 Wiel, Maaike van der, 9, 181 Willems, Gerrit, 9, 179, 181 Willis, Deborah, 198 Windrush generation, 77 Winiata, Pakeke, 205 Winnicott, D.W., 82 wood and photography, 222 World Intellectual Property Organization, 102 World’s Fair (1851), 114 World Trade Organization, 102 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 114 XYZ