After 200 Years: Photographic - Essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia Today (hardcover)

After 200 Years was conceived by the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies as a major Bicentennial project (funded by the Australian Bicentennial Authority). It aimed to document, through photographs and texts, the diversity of Aboriginal and Islander life in Australia in the late 1980s. To achieve this, over twenty Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal photographers worked with communities all over Australia for periods of up to two months. The result is a vast archive of over 50,000 documented photographs which is lodged in Canberra. One hundred photographs from this archive have been selected for the collection of the Australian National Gallery and are presented in this exhibition.

The first white settlers arrived in Australia 200 years ago, beginning a process that threatened to extinguish Aboriginal life on this continent. It was not until the 1960s that all Aboriginal people achieved full citizenship rights; for most this has been at best a second-class citizenship as they struggle against entrenched racist attitudes and stereotypes. Most Aborigines therefore found no reason to celebrate Australia's Bicentennial year in 1988.

The complicity of photographic image-making in the creation and perpetuation of negative attitudes and stereotypes over the last 100 years was a critical point of departure for the After 200 Years project. The cultural bias of the photographic perspective has reinforced the two major mythologies of Aboriginal Australia: that of the 'noble savage' on the one hand, living a 'traditional', pre-contact pattern of life; on the other, the passive, broken 'victim', living on the fringes of non-Aboriginal society. This project has attempted to redirect the imagery of Aboriginal Australia in two main ways — both of which have been exploratory.

from hompage: AFTER 200 YEARS Photographs of Aboriginal and Islander Australia Today

The principal objective was to represent the diversity of Aboriginal Australia and to move into everyday worlds of Aboriginal work, play, home and neighbourhood. These are the areas excluded from a photographic obsession which up until now has focused on the 'exotic', the 'authentic' and the 'traditional'. This approach demanded that the project address the actual distribution of people throughout the country to counter the widely held assumption that 'real' Aborigines live exclusively in remote Australia.

The second, more problematic, aim was to engage the maximum involvement of Aboriginal people in making a statement about their lifestyles, in their own terms. There is a growing body of literature on how photographs mislead, how they are fitted into cultural and political agendas to reinforce dominant power structures, and how people read photographs differently; this was all pertinent to the project. If Aboriginal involvement was to be more than a token gesture, a means had to be found to overcome both this photographic bias in favour of the dominant culture, and the rigid way in which the camera lens, in dividing the photographer from the photographed, epitomizes black — white relations.

The project participants relied on a combination of recent advances in theories of representation and photodocumentary ethics, and on certain understandings of the interests of the participants themselves. They therefore aimed for a genre of collaborative documentary photography in which the participants could control and direct the work of the photographer, the selection of images, and the texts that would accompany them. It was a method which attempted to develop a long-term model of co-operation between an institution and its Aboriginal constituents, between an archive and the people whose images would fill it, between photographers and their subjects, between different classes of people, between strangers and friends.

It is expected that these photographs will show themselves to be the product of collaboration; but will also reveal the struggle, tension, anxiety and self-doubt of people on both sides of the camera seeking to define a better way of making pictures. The aim was not to obscure the complexities and contradictions of that exercise, but rather to hold it up for view and examination as an essential aspect of the images themselves.

The project's most original contribution lies in the process of negotiation which attempted to find new positions in the unavoidable subject - object dichotomy inherent in photography and to ensure that the 'subjects' would control their own images. Briefly, the approach took into account the following factors: