TY - JOUR
T1 - Thick photography
AU - Deger, Jennifer
N1 - Funding Information:
The research and exhibition making was funded by an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, and also supported by the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Arts NT and the Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts Aboriginal Corporation. Many thanks to Lay?pu Wunungmurra, Susan Marrawungu, and Nicole Deger-Beauman for additional image permissions. Conversations with Diana Young, Jane Sloan, John von Sturmer, Melinda Hinkson, Fred Myers, Cathy Greenhalgh and Haidy Geismar infuse the ideas above in lasting ways for which I am grateful.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2016, © The Author(s) 2016.
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2016/3/1
Y1 - 2016/3/1
N2 - Across remote Aboriginal Australia, phone and tablet photographic technologies are giving rise to vibrant new forms of visual culture. Greenscreen software, montage and .gif effects enable the creation of layered images that literally pulse with meaning and affect. Akin to bark painting – yet deliberately different – such images reveal the spectral depth of Yolngu worlds. At a time when families across Arnhem Land face relentless loss and social stress, the making, sharing and viewing of elaborated family photographs reaffirm, reconstitute, and thicken a world of vitality, resonance and ancestral significance. Through deliberately posed and often highly postproduced photography Yolngu can creatively participate in a profoundly synaesthetic and sentient world, a world enlivened by uncanny encounter, a world that requires the ongoing affirmation and renewal of relationships through imagistic practice. This is a world of sensuous force and inside meanings, a world that far exceeds the registers of what the eye can see, the camera can capture, or, indeed, what the anthropologist will ever know.
AB - Across remote Aboriginal Australia, phone and tablet photographic technologies are giving rise to vibrant new forms of visual culture. Greenscreen software, montage and .gif effects enable the creation of layered images that literally pulse with meaning and affect. Akin to bark painting – yet deliberately different – such images reveal the spectral depth of Yolngu worlds. At a time when families across Arnhem Land face relentless loss and social stress, the making, sharing and viewing of elaborated family photographs reaffirm, reconstitute, and thicken a world of vitality, resonance and ancestral significance. Through deliberately posed and often highly postproduced photography Yolngu can creatively participate in a profoundly synaesthetic and sentient world, a world enlivened by uncanny encounter, a world that requires the ongoing affirmation and renewal of relationships through imagistic practice. This is a world of sensuous force and inside meanings, a world that far exceeds the registers of what the eye can see, the camera can capture, or, indeed, what the anthropologist will ever know.
KW - Aboriginal visual culture
KW - anthropology of photography
KW - digital aesthetics
KW - digital materiality
KW - indigenous media
KW - light as material culture
KW - photographic affect
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84960860131&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/1359183515623312
DO - 10.1177/1359183515623312
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84960860131
VL - 21
SP - 111
EP - 132
JO - Journal of Material Culture
JF - Journal of Material Culture
SN - 1359-1835
IS - 1
ER -