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DISSERTATION

Australian National University School of Art Photography and Media Arts

Photography and our connection with our culture, history and identity

by James STEELE

February 2014

A dissertation submitted in support for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The Australian National University

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STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL WORK

The work contained in this dissertation has not been previously submitted for assessment at any other higher education institution. It contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

~

6 February 2014

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Abstract

Because of their evidentiary nature, photographs are used to reinforce arguments about history, culture, and identity. With billions of photographs now available online, growing numbers of cameras capturing every moment, and people sharing the resulting images in an instant across the globe, the connection between even a single photograph and the basic truth of the reality it purports to represent becomes more contentious, especially as more and more materials are digitised and available easily for any viewer to confirm or refute what is represented about the images before them.

Primary sources like photographs, newspapers, journals, and books are now available electronically through the internet. These sources provide instant access to information that can be used to unpack the story of a single image, possibly revealing perspectives on that image that were not previously available to a professional scholar within even a lifetime of research. As increasingly-connected consumers become producers, and the means of production in any number of media become more accessible as prices for hardware, software and media tumble and ease of use increases, anyone with a blog and access to previously buried materials becomes a historian or a critic, and can now publicly question the authority of the cash-strapped national institution, the harried curator or the focused academic.

The emergence of new digital archives change the way our culture is collected, stored, arranged and accessed. Unless traditional institutions of cultural memory like galleries, libraries, archives and museums embrace the changes and engage more actively with their constituents, the importance of their role in managing the resources that define our culture will decline.

As a result of my studio practice investigations into how photographs document and represent place, I examined four photographs from Australia's past to see how they might be interpreted in the light of the new online information ecosystem. I found that the photographs are more complex than previously thought. They are both true and false reflections of the realities they seek to portray.

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Table of contents

Table

List of illustrations Preface

Truth and photography .. Photography and Image and

Gatekeepers and crowdsourcing Digital memory

The Photographs

. ... 14 19 27

Portrait of the Southwell family at Coo/amine Homestead ...... .

32 44 49 51 A

Mounted Constables Willshire and Wurm brand ...... . The True Story of Capture of Ah Kim

Bibliography ... .

Photography and history, culture and identity Page 4

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List of illustrations

Fig. l. Portrait of the Southwell family at Coo/amine Homestead, Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, ca. 1909. Anon. nla.pic-vn4278494

Fig. 2. A Pioneer Settler, attributed to George Bell 1895-1900. Powerhouse Museum

Fig. 3. Mounted Constables Willshire and Wurmbrand, with the Native Police in Camp, in Central Australia, 26th May, 1887. James Taylor 1888. Reproduced courtesy of Royal

Geographical Society of South Australia lnc ... 10

Fig. 4. Capture of Ah Kim at 10.20pm on the 11th May 1875. Paul Foelsche 1875. State Library of South Australia 8 72247 ... ... .. ... 11

Fig. 5. Portrait of the Southwell family at Coo/amine Homestead, Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, ca. 1909. nla.pic-vn42 78494 ... 52

Fig. 6. Coo/amine Homestead. James Steele 2009 ... 52

Fig. 7. Southwell family at Coo/amine Homestead, detail. nla.pic-vn4278494 ... 53

Fig. 8. Coolamine Homestead: Draft conservation plan, p.61... .. ... 55

Fig. 9. Coolamine Homestead: Draft conservation plan, p.63 ... 56

Fig. 10. A Pioneer Settler -Powerhouse Museum Tyrrell Photographic Collection. 85/1284-58 Fig. 11. A Pioneer Settler - 61 Fig. 12. A Pioneer Settler as it appears in the Powerhouse Museum publication 'New South Wales Pioneers' Photographs by George Bell, 62 Fig. 13. Mounted Constables Willshire and Wurmbrand, with the Native Police in Camp, in Central Australia, 26th May, 1887. James Taylor 1888. Reproduced courtesy of Royal Geographical Society of South Australia Inc ... 6 7 Fig. 15. Capture of Ah Kim at 10,20p.m. on the 11th. May 1875 Digital print from 600dpi scan of original wet-plate glass negative, State Library of South Australia. 8 72247 ... 73

Fig. 16. Capture of Ah Kim - detail of number... .. ... 75

Fig. 17. Capture of Ah Kim -detail Fig. 18. State Library of South Australia online Catalogue entry for Reconstruction of capture of Ah Kim, 22 November 2011 Fig.19. Capture of Ah Kim -detail. Note the hand on the branch of the tree ... .. Fig. 20. Capture of Ah Kim -detail of gunsmoke ... .. Photography and history, culture and identity PageS 76 78 .. ... 84

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Preface

In 1875 on a beach in the Northern Territory of South Australia, a policeman staged a tableau representing an incident that had happened there. He photographed his theatricalisation of the event, added some gunsmoke to the glass plate with a pencil, but did nothing further with the image. Almost 100 years later, his granddaughter handed several hundred of his glass-plate negatives over to a photographic historian, Robert Noye, who found Capture of Ah Kim at 10:20p.m. on the 11th. May 1875 among the images.1

The policeman was Inspector of Police Paul Heinrich Matthias Foelsche. He was appointed to lead the first permanent Northern Territory Police force in 1869, and remained at the head of the force there until his retirement in 1904. As well as being a member of the police force, Foelsche was a gunsmith, dentist, freemason, and photographer. His photographs of the Northern Territory and its people during the early years of European settlement provide a unique insight into that era.2

By exploring the story behind the incident portrayed in Capture of Ah Kim almost 140 years after it was created, a different meaning emerges from this ambiguous and misleading image.

Photographs from the past can now be read within a broader context of growing amounts of more specific and detailed information made available, and easily accessible, through the internet. Spread across the collections of institutions around the globe, this information was until recently difficult for even professional scholars to cover entirely.

When a viewer looks at a photograph presented within this widening context of more specific and detailed information, what exactly do they now 'see'? How has the meaning of a photograph been changed by the expanded set of information now available over the

internet about it and its subject? What role will collecting institutions and their professional staff play in the emerging digital age?

As many photographic theorists like Rudolf Arnheim have said, photographs are only "a fragment, a sample extirpated from an action whose integrity resides beyond the realm of

1 Rita Dunstan, "Camera-Eye on Early Darwin: The First Police Chief Took These Pictures," The Australian Women's Weekly, 8 October 1969, 20.

2 Robert Noye, "The Photography of Paul Foelsche: Centenary Exhibition" (Corporation of the City of Darwin, 1970).

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the picture",3 and "with the passage of time (their] moorings become unstuck".• While never being able to recreate the instant or the era in which a particular photograph was

made, access to contemporary sources gives a viewer the potential to rediscover at least some of these 'moorings' and to look into the action beyond the fragment revealed in the

frame that may explain the photograph. These newly available digital materials give us

insights into more pieces of the puzzle and open up the possibility that a viewer may be

able to reconnect the fragments to get a greater understanding of a photograph, the

circumstances surrounding its creation, and how the creator thought.

While researching how photographs document and represent place in my creative practice, I became interested in how any photographs, particularly historical photographs,

were interpreted. Using four examples of photographs taken in Australia in the nineteenth

and early twentieth century, I explored how they were understood in the past and today.

The four photographs are Southwell family at Coo/amine Homestead; A Pioneer Settler; Mounted Constables Willshire and Wurmbrand; and Capture of Ah Kim.s

3 Rudolf Arnheim, "On the Nature of Photography," Critical Inquiry l, no.1 (1974): 151. 4 Susan Sontag, On Photography (Picador, 2001), 71.

5 anon., Portrait of the Southwell Family at Coo/amine Homestead, Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, Ca. 1909 [picture] Photographic negative: b&w, ca 1909, http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic

-vn4278494; George Bell (attr.), Pioneer Settler Lucy Sawtell in Front of a Cottage with Her Children, 1895 -1917 Silver gelatin dry plate glass negative, 1917 1895, Tyrrell Collection,

http://from.ph/30208; Native Constables Willshire and Wurmbrand is included in the catalogue: Royal Geographic Society of South Australia Inc., "Images of Aboriginal Australians 1773-1901"

(Royal Geographic Society of South Australia, September 2011),

http://www.rgssa.org.au/ AboriginalAustralians.pdf; Paul Foelsche, Capture of Ah Kim at 10,20p.m. on the 11th. May 1875 wet-plate glass negative, May 1875,

http://www.samuseum.sa.gov.au/ assets/images /whatson/ exhibitions /foe Ishee/ iii/ 2 l_ah-ki m.j pg.

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Fig. 1. Portrait of the Southwell family at Coo/amine Homestead, Snowy Mountains, New South Wales, ca. 1909. Anon. nla.pic-vn4278494

While working with photographs of huts in the Kosciuszko National Park from the Pictures Collection in the National Library of Australia, I discovered that the photograph titled by the Library Portrait of the Southwell family at Coolamin_e Homestead, Snowy Mountains, ca. 1909 was not a photograph of the Southwell family but of the Taylor family. This simple cataloguing error led to explorations of how photographs were used to represent truth and how viewers interpret them. Portrait of the Southwell family was an example of how surrounding text influences our understanding ofan image.

[image:8.390.8.376.14.504.2]
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Fig. 2. A Pioneer Settler, attributed to George Bell 1895-1900. Powerhouse Museum 85/1284· 777

Another image that turned out to be not as it first appeared was A Pioneer Settler, attributed by its custodian, the Powerhouse Museum, to the photographer George Bell. First investigated because of the existence in the photograph ofa small figure leaning up against the hut in the background with his back to us, it turned out that the photograph was not a true representation of the circumstances it sought to portray. As later discussed, it is also highly improbable that George Bell took it, and it was taken years after the date originally assumed for its creation.

[image:9.390.7.377.18.571.2]
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Fig. 3. Mounted Constables Willshire ond Wurmbrand, with the Native Police in Camp, in Central Australia, 26th May, 1887. James Taylor 1888. Reproduced courtesy of Royal Geographical Society of South Australia Inc

Obviously a studio tableau, Mounted Constables Willshire and Wurmbrand, with the Native Police in Camp, in Central Australia, 26<h May, 1887 was taken in January 1888 in Port

Augusta in South Australia. Constable Willshire was not present in the Camp on the date in the title for the image, and his relationship with the Aboriginal people was more complex

that a viewer might imagine by looking at the photograph, especially if the viewer had no knowledge of Willshire's reputation for dealing with Aborigines.

[image:10.390.7.375.16.308.2]
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Fig. 4. Capture of Ah Kim at 10.20pm on the 11" May 1875. Paul Foelsche 1875. State Library of South Australia B 72247

Capture of Ah Kim surfaced one hundred years after the event it purports to portray occurred. Apart from the identity of the photographer, the only ~mmediate context for the image is the title: there is nothing surviving about the photograph, either from the photographer or anyone else around at the time, that explains it. There is, however, an emerging body of material that can enlighten the viewer about the subject of the tableau, raising questions about the story it seeks to represent and the motives of the

photographer in making the photograph.

[image:11.390.9.376.30.553.2]
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The photographs examined here reveal a more complex association with reality than at

first might appear to be the case. When they are considered in the light of the detailed and

specific information becoming available on the internet, A Pioneer Settler is not so much a

record of a rural family but more likely to be a tableau constructed by a commercial

photographer to sell as a postcard; Portrait of the Southwell family at Coo/amine

Homestead turns out to show a different family than the title and description identify.

Mounted Police Willshire and Wurmbrand is a studio tableau depicting what appears to be

an easy relationship between European and native police a few years before the central

European figure in the image was tried for murdering aborigines.

The photographers created these photographs as records of staged, posed or

theatricalised scenes that are more complex than an initial glance at them might suggest.

Unpacking the meaning of each of them required consideration of a number of factors: the

relationship between truth and photography; photographs as historical documents; the

relationships between photographs and the information that surrounds them, especially

in the digital age; and the opportunities now available for collecting institutions to engage

with their communities through social media and to use the new information ecosystem to

unpack the meaning of these historical images. I explore these ideas hefore looking in

detail at the four photographs identified above.

The custodians of these relics ofour history - galleries, libraries.archives and museums -have the opportunity to embrace new social media techniques and internet technologies

and maintain their roles as keepers and interpreters of our cultural artefacts, particularly

in relation to new artefacts born and existing only in digital forms. Some Australian

institutions have begun to address these emerging issues: the National Library of Australia

is leading the world in the engagement of the community in increasing the value of the

Trove Digitised Newspapers service by allowing public corrections of the electronically

generated text,6 and the National Archives of Australia has opened up its collection to

public contributions through its Hive project.7 Other institutions could commit to similar

projects; although it would require changes in focus and the reallocation of scarce resources.

6 Rose Holley, Many Hands Make Light Work: Public Collaborative OCR Text Correction in Australian Historic Newspapers, National Library of Australia Staff Papers (National Library of Australia, 2009), http:/ /www.nla.gov.au/ open publish/ index. ph p /nlasp /article/view /1406 / 1688.

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Rose Holley, "National Archives of Australia Embraces Crowdsourcing and Releases 'The Hive,"' Rose Holley's Blog, 10 November 2012, http:/ /rose-holley.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/national-archives-of-australia-embraces.html.

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The research reported here could have been accomplished using traditional techniques: travelling to repositories, wading through catalogues, indexes, microforms, books, journals, reports and letters. Indeed, some of the research was accomplished in just that customary fashion where materials have not been digitised. By using the affordances of the internet, it is now possible to cover significantly more ground with far less resources in a much shorter time, using materials that have been made available in searchable form there.8

While the materials available on the internet represent a significant amount of

information, they do not cover the entire collections of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums that hold the artefacts of our past. Rose Holley, from the National Library of Australia's Trove Digitised Newspapers project, estimated in early 2012 that "[m]ost national cultural heritage institutions have digitised less than 3% of their content."9 While

3% is a small proportion of the materials held by these institutions, the institutions have

made decisions on which materials to digitise first. The National Library of Australia, for example, prioritises those materials that are, among other criteria, deemed to be of cultural or historical significance; unique or fragile; in high demand; or under threat of format obsolescence.10 Even though there is such a small fraction of the collections available in digital form, the significance of the materials that have been digitised is greater than the small proportion might indicate. My research has established that there is still sufficient material to support the arguments put forward here: they can be used to show that early Australian photographs are more complex than-was previously thought; and that, given the right opportunity, the community is willing to engage actively with institutions to make the collections more accessible and more valuable.

8 According to Donald Norman, "[t]he word 'affordance' was originally invented by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal). To Gibson, affordances are a relationship. They are a part of nature: they do not have to be visible, known, or desirable. Some affordances are yet to be discovered. Some are dangerous. I suspect that none of us know all the affordances of even everyday objects." http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html. In The Design of Everyday Things, Norman writes "the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used .... A chair affords ('is for') support and, therefore, affords sitting." Donald Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. (New York, Basic Books, 2002), 9. The internet affords search, discovery, access to text, visual and audio information, and communication.

9 Rose Holley, "Dealing with the Digital Deluge: 10 Challenges for GLAM's," Rose Holley's Blog, 29 January 2012, http:/ /rose-holley.blogspot.com.au/2012/01/dealing-with-digital-deluge-10.html. 10 National Library of Australia, "Collection Digitisation Policy," accessed 15 January 2013, http://www.nla.gov.au/policy-and-planning/collection-digitisation-policy.

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Truth and photography

From the announcement of photography in 1839 people generally believed that what they

saw in photographs was the truth.11 They "assumed that photographic seeing was

unmediated, that photographers responded directly to what was observed with limited

latitude for interpretation."12 Despite the many different approaches to photography

pursued in its early years, "photography has achieved the paradoxical credibility of a

subjective, interpretive medium that has simultaneously been deemed reliable and

ultimately useful as a social and personal arbiter."13 As the experience of photographing

became more widespread, made more accessible first with dry plates then flexible film,

then with the Kodak camera and subsequently the Leica, the subjectivity of the

photographer became more apparent as more people created their own photographs. The

digitalisation of photography from the late twentieth century stretched viewers' trust even

further, with manipulation of images now within the grasp of a wider community.

Filmmaker Wim Wenders said that "[t]he digitized picture has broken the relationship

between picture and reality once and for all. We are entering an era when no one will be

able to say whether a picture is true or false."11

Nonetheless, people still generally believe that even digital photographs are true

representations of something that happened in the real world - from newspaper

photographs to Face book snapshots, generally a viewer accepts that the photograph

documents a 'true' event, as viewers have done in the past. Roland Barthes said, "in

Photography I can never deny that the thing has been there", claiming that it was "the very

essence, the noeme of Photography."1s In his 1945 essay The Ontology of the Photographic Image, Andre Bazin argued "that the image was an unmediated copy, or trace, of the object

before the lens.''16 He also argued that a photograph is "[n]ot at all the image of an object

or being, but more exactly its trace .... The photograph proceeds by means of the lens to

the making of a veritable luminous impression in light-to a mould."17 Susan Sontag

similarly claims "a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), ... it is also

11 Jennifer G. Tucker, Nature Exposed: Photography as Eyewitness in Victorian Science (]HU Press,

2006), 1.

12 Liz Wells, Land Matters (London; New York: 18 Tauris, 2011), 266.

13 Fred Ritch in, After Photography (W. W. Norton, 2008), 19.

14 Cited in ibid., 67.

15 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (Hill and Wang, 1982), 76-77.

16 Steve Edwards, Photography: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 80.

17 See Jonathan Friday, "Andre Bazin's Ontology of Photographic and Film Imagery," Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 63, no. 4 (Fall 2005): 343.

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a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask."18. In Tom Gunning's terms, "the indexicality of the photograph depends on a physical relation between the object photographed and the image finally created."19 According to Steve Edwards, "[w]hat is particular, and peculiar, about photographs is the conjuncture of resemblance and trace -the iconic and indexical components of the sign coincide to a remarkable degree."20

Professor of Philosophy from the University of Nottingham Gregory Currie explains the idea of trace by saying "a photograph is a trace of its subject, while a painting is testimony of it."21 Accepting this idea, a viewer of a photograph, without evidence to the contrary, would see the photograph as a true and objective representation of something that had occurred before the lens while the image was being made. A painting, on the other hand, is the painter's subjective view. Currie refers to other writers to reinforce the view that photographs are seen as true representations: "Bazin and, following him, Roger Scruton and Kendall Walton have claimed that photography and cinematography do not provide us merely with a distinctive form of representation: rather, they reproduce reality for us."22

Like Barthes, we accept that the thing, even if it is a reconstruction or a theatricalisation of an event, has been there: that the photograph is a trace of some real occurrence. Writing about Australia's colonial photography in nineteenth century Victoria, Jane Lydon noted: ... realist photography had become a privileged discourse within Western society, its status as seemingly impartial witness triumphing over its potential to equivocate. In its mechanical and physical reflection of the world, its indexicality, it produces passive and precise imprints of truth that appeared to transcend individual interest, objectively defining stable identities and knowledges. The medium's seeming veracity drew it into the service of state and empire, apparently able to classify human variation and behaviour factually, impartially and

completely." 23

According to Lydon, photographing theatricalisations of events was practiced in the nineteenth century. Discussing images of Aboriginal performances staged for John Hunter Kerr's camera in the 1850s, she says:

1a Sontag, On Photography, 154.

19 Tom Gunning, "What's the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs," NORD/COM Review no. 1/2 (2004): 40.

20 Edwards, Photography, 83.

21 Gregory Currie, "Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs," Journal of Aesthetics & Art Criticism 57, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 286.

22 Ibid., 289.

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[p]erhaps these performative, ephemeral moments of contact between Aborigines and

strangers have been overlooked by historians because they are too self-consciously theatrical:

in their self-presentation, they seem not to require professional interpretation, standing apart

from the raw materials of the documentary archive. To modern eyes, photographs, and

especially theatrical, antirealist images, occupy the same discursive space, too obviously

staged and framed by an acknowledged author to be trusted, apparently rendering further

comment superfluous. Unlike the transparent windows of mid-century Victorian realism,

vernacular and often self-presencing photographic forms have been disparaged, disregarded,

and omitted from official canons and histories.24

Even staged tableaux can tell us a story: while they may not stand for historical truth, they

provide evidence that something happened before the lens: that a photographer made an effort to orchestrate a scene and capture the moment. The photographs that I have

investigated here are theatrical images, but nonetheless they do provide us with insights into the thinking of the photographers and of the societies at the time they were made.

With the advent of digital photography and the ease with which imagery can be manipulated on a computer with cheap and widely available software, some commentators lament the passing of this innocence and the objective reality of photographs, and warn of a new age of confusion and manipulation facilitated by the

digitalisation ofphotography.2s According to Anne Marsh, "[d]igital reproduction is seen to destabilise the medium because there is no longer any certainty that an image has its genesis in the real world (the thing in front of the camera)."26 Lamenting the death of the

photograph, Geoffrey Batchen says, "[t]he prospect is that, increasingly, viewers will

discard their faith in the photograph's ability to deliver objective truth, and that the

medium of photography will thereby Jose its power as a privileged conveyor of information."27

While people may still believe that what is presented in a photograph is 'real', a photograph's objectivity as an image has been a myth from the beginning of the desire to freeze the moment at a place, or of an activity or a person. The mere choice of the moment to preserve is an act of curating. The subject, the angle, the framing, the field of view, the

lighting, the exposure settings, the camera and light-fixing technologies, directing the

subjects to smile and keep still, are all subject to the choice and direction of the

" Ibid., 29-30.

25 Geoffrey Batchen, "Post-Photography," in Each Wild Idea, 2001.

26 Anne Marsh, "The Digital Menace: [Has Digitalisation Dealt a Death Blow to Photography?]," Photofile no. 91 (December 2010): 55.

27 Geoffrey Batchen, "Phantasm: Digital Imaging and the Death of Photography," Aperture 136 [Summer 1994): 47.

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photographer as curator. The technology used to capture the image has an impact on how

the moment is preserved: a daguerreotype taking up to several minutes to expose when

compared with a candid portrait captured in less that one one-thousandth of a second

communicate differently to viewers. Selecting the ones to keep and rejecting other

photographs during the editing process is subjective. Post-processing in the darkroom or

Photoshop manipulates the image, and therefore the viewer. Manipulation has been

present since the making of the first photograph: digitalisation of the process merely

makes it less subtle, easier to do, more widespread, and recognised more often.Zs

Photographic fakery predates the digital age: the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Faking It

exhibition illustrates the long history of photographic manipulation, going back to the

early years of photography and the images 'created' by Oscar Rejlander and Henry Peach

Robinson. Gustave Le Gray and Carleton Watkins continued the tradition with multiple

exposures that were combined to expand the dynamic range of their landscape

photographs. William Mumler's spirit photography and the erasure of those who fell from

grace in Stalin's Soviet Union provide further examples of photographic fakery.29 While a

photograph can be faked, it does not mean that it has been faked. Even if a photograph has been faked, it does not mean that it can be dismissed as being unworthy of interpretation:

what appears in the image was constructed by the photographer - by planning to take a

photograph, setting the scene, and choosing the moment. The photographer's motivations

for creating the image can give us insight into how they thought about themselves and

their societies.

Snyder tells us that "[t]he formal account of vision requires that what we see be

understood as the product of a construction, initiated by the impression, but informed at

the level of imagination."30 Each viewer will construct their own interpretation of what a

photograph means based on what they see and more importantly what they think about

what they see. Our experiences, culture, and prejudices provide the field in which our

imagination roams. When evaluating a photograph, Snyder and Allen advise that:

The documentary value of a photograph is not determined solely by Arnheim's questions of 'authenticity,' 'correctness,' and 'truth.' We can also ask what it means, who made it,for whom was it made, and why it was made in the way it was made. These questions are asked of other 'documents,' ranging from Minoan warehouse receipts to great works of art. They

2s Gunning, "What's the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs."

29 Mia Fineman et al., Faking It: Manipulated Photography before Photoshop (New York; New Haven: Metropolitan Museum of Art; Distributed by Yale University Press, 2012).

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should be asked of'documentary' photographs and photographs-considered-as-documents as

well.·"

We might therefore accept that a photograph is a trace of the real - it is, in Arnheim's

terms, authentic, correct, or true - but at the same time question why the photographer

has constructed the scene before the camera. A viewer may assume that what they see in the photograph did stand before the lens at the time the picture was made, but it does not

follow that what was there was not constructed or framed to support a meaning that depended on the viewer interpreting what they were seeing through the photographer's

eyes. A photographer who understands how a viewer will interpret a photograph can use

this knowledge to construct a scene and make a photograph of it that will elicit a particular response from the viewer: in the photographs to be examined later in this dissertation, I argue that this is the motivation, conscious or unconscious, for the

photographers in creating the images. lfwe can uncover their motivations, through their

own accounts or those of others surrounding the creation of the images or the events they

portray, we can use this information together with the photographs to help us to understand how the photographers constructed their reality, and how they thought about themselves, and saw their role and their society. While today we might not consider tableau photographs as unmediated indexical traces of actual events and therefore not

true reflections of a real history, nonetheless they represent other, constructed truths that can give us insights into the thinking of the time.

31 Joel Snyder and Neil Walsh Allen, "Photography, Vision, and Representation," Critical Inquiry 2, no. 1 (1 October 1975): 169; see also Arnheim, "On the Nature of Photography," 157.

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Photography and history

From Stephen Fry to Melbourne Water, there is a widely accepted belief in the community

that our understanding of the past determines our future. In his 2006 speech at the launch

of the History Matters campaign, Fry asks, "[h]ow can we understand our present or

glimpse our future ifwe cannot understand our past? How can we know who we are ifwe

don't know who we were?"32 The Cultural Heritage Strategy of Melbourne Water says,

"[t]he past contributes to our sense of who we are today and is an important factor in

determining our future aspirations."33 Cultural institutions are invested with history: in

their collections they hold the historical artefacts that, through our interpretations of them,

can unlock the past. When we look at any historical artefact -whether it is, for example, a

piece of pottery, a building, a newspaper, a letter, a book, or a photograph -we have to

understand where it came from, its place in our history, and accept the truth of what it

represents before we can accept it as evidence of our past heritage.

Along with artefacts, places can also contribute to our understanding of our past. The

Burra Charter argues for the preservation of places of cultural significance, saying that

such places act as "tangible expressions of Australian identity and experience".34

Photographs of places of cultural significance from our past reflect the diversity of

community and landscape and can be a powerful reminder of wh9t was there and what

happened there: they are tangible expressions of our identity and experience that enrich

our lives. They are historical evidence that, in conjunction with other credible sources of

information, can add to our understanding of our past and the foundations of our identity.

Photographs of places like Coolamine Homestead or a settler's hut in Darrigo, examined

later in this dissertation, can help us to understand our past, although ifwe are to use

them as accurate evidence of our past we need to look at them within the context of why

the photographers chose to create these particular impressions of their community. The

two other photographs examined -Mounted Constables Willshire and Wurmbrand and

Capture of Ah Kim -purport to show events from our colonial past: they turn out to be

constructions that do not accord with the truth of the events they seek to portray. As a

community, we must agree on the truth of these photographs that purport to represent

JZ Stephen Fry, "The Future's in the Past," The Guardian, 9 July 2006,

http:/ /www.guardian.co. uk/theo bserver /2 0 0 6 /j ul/ 09 /featuresreview. review.

33 Melbourne Water, Preserving and Promoting Our Cultural Heritage: Cultural Heritage Strategy

2008 -2011 [Melbourne: Melbourne Water, September 2008), 6.

34 Australia I CO MOS Inc, The Surra Charter: The Australia ICOMOS Charter for Places of Cultural Significance [Burwood, Victoria: Australia lCOMOS Incorporated, 2000), 1,

http://australia.icomos.org/wp-content/uploads/BURRA_CHARTER.pdf.

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the places and the events from our past, because that shared agreement provides the solid

foundation for our shared aspiration for our future.

All photographs are about the past. Once the shutter is closed, the moment is gone.

Whether the image made is of a moment ago, fifty or a hundred years or more, it loses its immediate connection with the context within which it was made. Any viewer not present at the moment of creation can only interpret the image isolated from that moment. Any

viewer who was present and subsequently sees the photograph will also interpret it from

their own perspective and in the light of their experiences in the period between the capture of the image and their looking at the photograph. The photographer's reasons for

creating the artefact are also an important context within which a photograph's meaning must be interpreted if its truth is to be understood.

Influences on the trace begin before the shutter is opened: Joel Snyder says, "the picture is made before it's taken; ... and the photographer calls the shots to the world, and not the other way around."35 As history, a photograph shows us its subject through the eye of the

photographer as well as the lens of the camera. Other influences continue throughout the time between when the photograph was conceived and when a viewer sees it, or even

recalls seeing it, that have an impact on their interpretation of it. Understanding these

influences requires more than just looking at the photograph. A viewer's interpretation may be influenced if they understand the motivations of the photographer, or those of anyone else involved -a writer, an editor, or a curator, for example - throughout the process that leads to the viewer seeing the image and the context within which they see it.

Evidence that reveals the motivations and perspectives of these players is not just in the photograph: it extends to a wide range of materials like captions, labels, newspaper stories,

journal articles, books, reports, letters, catalogue entries, exhibition notes, interviews, other photographs and other accounts relating to the artefact itself, its subject, and to the

people who have brought it to the viewer's attention. Traditionally these materials are

held in cultural institutions, and access to them is necessary if a full account is to be made of a photograph. Much of the material is open to interpretation: if we are to understand

the artefacts, the people who made them, and their motivations for making them, the

institutions that keep them need to facilitate discourse that explain them.

Historical photographs give the viewer an opportunity to see evidence of the past through

the eyes of the photographer, aided by the custodians along the way whose efforts

35 Joel Snyder, Is Photography Over? Day One, Part One (SFMOMA, 2010), 00:17:54:00,

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preserve the material artefacts and make it possible for a viewer to see them today. These

photographs are available to the community largely through the collections of galleries, libraries, archives and museums that have made decisions about which photographs to collect, which to keep, and which to make available for the community to see. As

gatekeepers, sometimes institutions make decisions about what should be kept, what

should be discarded, and what should be shared with the wider community: at the

Migration and Exchange Symposium held in Melbourne in November 2012, Geoff Barker

related the story of the Australian Museum culling from its holding of George Brown's

negatives those the Museum deemed were not of anthropological interest. While the

images may not have been of anthropological interest to the Australian Museum, there are

other possible instances in which Brown's nineteenth century photographs of life in the Pacific islands could provide a richer view of the past.36

Photographs made in the nineteenth century were never the 'decisive moments' made

possible by modern photographic technologies. Before the invention of the dry-plate

negative, the emulsion was slow, the photographer had to fix the camera and keep the

subject still, sometimes with physical restraints. Niepce's 'first photograph' took a day to expose.37 The resemblance to the actual view from the window may be poor, but the

artefact is an index of the scene - a trace left as a result of the light from the objects in the

view of the lens altering the light-sensitive chemicals coating the plate. Daguerre's

Boulevarde du Temple shows what is probably a busy street, but it-is devoid of all human

activity except for a shoe-shiner and client who must have been relatively still throughout

Daguerre's exposure. The rest of the bustling traffic has disappeared, moving so that an

impression of their existence could not be recorded during the long exposure.38 While we

can accept that what we see in the photograph is a trace of the real world, when interpreting historical photographs, among other considerations we have to understand

the technical limitations of the medium to be able to interpret what we see in the artefact and relate that to the real world it reflects. The long exposure, the variable sensitivity of the emulsions to different frequency of light, the lack of colour: all these influences alter the image and constrain the photographer in terms of what they can and cannot capture.

Early Australian photographers like Johan Friedrich Carl Kruger, Paul Heinrich Matthias

Foelsche, John William Lindt, James Taylor and the photographers of Charles Kerry's

36 Geoff Barker, "Analysing Context for Nineteenth-Century Pacific Photography" (Symposium presentation presented at the Migration and Exchange Symposium, University of Melbourne, 29 November 2012); citing Helen Bethea Gardner, Gathering for Cod: George Brown in Oceania (Dunedin, NZ: Otago, 2006), 15.

37 Naomi Rosenblum, World History of Photography (Abbeville Press, 2008), 17. 38 Jbid.

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Sydney studio -George Bell and Harold Bradley -captured images of our past using the

cumbersome equipment and chemical processes that were necessary then before the

industrialization of photography. Knowing these limitations, we can still use the images

these photographers created of our past as evidence of the history of our culture: to give

us a sense of our past and how our forbears constructed the country in which we live

today. They provide us with images that, for example, can give us an insight into the

treatment of Aboriginal people and minorities like the Chinese, or their attitude to a

woman represented as a wife and a mother apparently left alone to care for her family in

the bush. Australians can use these images to reinforce their cultural identity as a group of

European people who came as immigrants to a foreign land, overcame adversities of

distance and privation, displaced the native inhabitants, competed for determining the

cultural identity of the nation with other races like the Chinese, and triumphed as the

successful community. While what appeared in front of their cameras was reproduced on

the negative -a trace of the real - the photographs reflect a construction: a particular

perspective that started with the photographer and is reinforced by the context in which

the photograph has been used and is encountered today.

Kruger's contracted depiction of Aboriginal people living in Coranderrk; Lindt's studio

portraits of Aborigines on the north coast of New South Wales in the 1870s; Foelsche's

views taken to promote investment in industry in the Northern Territory for display at

exhibitions in Melbourne, Philadelphia and Paris, and other photographs of Aboriginal

people produced for ethnographers; and Kerry's commercial business of selling

photographs: these are all contexts within which their particular photographs must be

interpreted if we are to use them meaningfully today to understand the past.

Charles Kerry and his photographers constructed visually engaging images in order to sell

postcards, prints and books.39 Frank Hurley's composite printing for his battle pictures,

and his recreation of the event for his Charge of the Fourth Light Horse Brigade

Beershebar,•o give us pause to consider how and why the photographer constructed the

image, and what its truth really is. Given the nature of the equipment that they used, and

the conditions under which they worked, these photographers had to construct their

images. Understanding the mechanics of how exactly they constructed them gives us an

insight into their thinking and how they constructed their own reality.

39 David P. Millar, Charles Kerry's Federation Australia (Sydney: David Ell Press, 1981).

•o Martyn Jolly, "Australian First-World-War Photography: Frank Hurley and Charles Bean," History of Photography 23, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 142.

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To Jean Baudrillard, "(t]he peculiar role of the photograph is not to illustrate the event but to constitute an event in itself',41 suggesting that the photograph and all the processes and activities surrounding its formulation, creation and distribution are separate from its subject and should be considered on their own, outside of its subject. Baudrillard also pondered the 'miracle' of photography: that the objective lens (objectifin French) "reveals a radically non-objective world .... The technique of photography takes us beyond the replica into the domain of the trompe /'oei/."42 Something in the process of separating the subject of a photograph from the impact of the artefact on the viewer deceives them about the true nature of the event apparently recorded. In the case of historical photographs, what we now see in them may very well have happened in front of the lens, but they do not tell us what might today be considered by historians to be the 'real' story of the event they purport to portray. James Taylor's Mounted Constables Willshire and Wurmbrand is an example of a photograph that does not accord with what is now accepted as the truth of the Northern Territory police's treatment of Aboriginal Australians in the nineteenth century, or even where Willshire was on 26 May 1887. The photograph is to be investigated later in this dissertation.

It is possible, in some cases certain, that other events purported to be depicted in photographs that we see from the past were the creations of photographers like Lindt, Foelsche, Kruger, and Kerry's employees: possibly based on real events but manufactured nonetheless to, for example, fit the requirements of the slow emulsions and the

cumbersome equipment; or the commercial demands of the photographer's employer and their customers; or, in Nicolas Peterson's words to support the "naturalising [of] the occupation of a continent"43 ; or, in Foelsche's case, to satisfy the requests from his superiors in South Australia to document the Northern Territory to encourage migration and investment. Australian adventurer and war photographer Frank Hurley was unable to

capture his preferred view of the battles he was charged with covering in the First World War without "resorting to combination pictures", so he produced "a single battle tableau" from a number of separate negatives.44 Reports suggest Foelsche posed his subjects and

removed vegetation to improve his images.•s Lindt's and Taylor's studio tableaux were certainly constructed, but nonetheless can tell us about the photographers' commercial

41 Jean Baudrillard, The Intelligence of Evil or the lucidity Pact, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Berg, 2007), 99.

12 Jean Baudrillard, "Photography, Or The Writing Of Light," trans. Francois Debrix, CTHEORY no. a083 (12 April 2000), http://www.ctheory.net/artic1es.aspx?id=126.

43 Nicolas Peterson, "A Colonial Image: Penetrating the Reality of the Message," Australian Aboriginal Studies no. 2 (1989): 62.

44 Jolly, "Australian First-World-War Photography: Frank Hurley and Charles Bean," 142, 141. 45 Gary Sauer-Thompson, "Conversations," accessed 1 November 2012, http://sauer

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exploitation of people or events to support their businesses and help us to understand something of the photographers' attitudes and how they saw their world, and how they wanted others to see their world. Even the anonymous photographer of Southwell family

at Coo/amine Homestead posed his subjects.

Ignoring for the moment the constructed photographs, the past is itself a construction: constructed by historians writing about it and photographers leaving us evidence that can mislead us. As Janet Abu-Lughod writes, "[t]o anyone concerned with issues of race and gender, the creation of alternative histories is nothing new", and "[a]ny history ... written from the one perspective of only one actor or society can only be a partial telling of the storio". To understand the storia -the whole history, all the narratives that reveal the past

-requires us to go beyond the single report or image to provide the 'triangulation' that Abu-Lughod also talks about as being necessary for understanding more fully the tales we

are being told in individual images.46 Triangulation -a term borrowed from a technique used in navigation to establish location using three or more reference points -requires that we take a number of different views or perspectives of an event or a person or a place to corroborate the truth of that event, person or place.

In social research triangulation is "generally considered a process of using multiple perspectives to clarify meaning, verifying the repeatability of an observation or

interpretation."47 ln this work, it is the multiple perspectives now-exposed through digitisation ofmetadata (like the catalogues of the State Archives of South Australia and

the Northern Territory archives that revealed the existence of official reports of the death of Ah Kim investigated later in this dissertation), and the digitisation of source materials themselves (especially the National Library of Australia's Trove Newspaper collection)

that now help the viewer to clarify the meaning of an image by providing access to

multiple perspectives that are persistent. While researchers and historians habitually use

multiple sources to help them interpret historical images, internet searches now allow an

expansion of techniques that can uncover many more perspectives with much less effort.

If a photograph is on the internet, and it has been indexed by image search engines like Google's Image Search,4B some initial context can now be established by where the photograph is embedded on the Web, and the information surrounding the photograph used to seed additional searches for other materials that may provide additional

46 Janet Abu-Lughod, "On the Remaking of History: How to Reinvent the Past," in Remaking History: Discussions in Contemporary History, 4 (Seattle: Bay Press, 1989), 111-112.

47 Norman K. Denzin and Yvonna S. Lincoln, The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research (SAGE, 2005), 454.

•a Google, "Google Images," accessed 30 September 2013, http://wwv.r.google.eom.au/imghp.

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perspectives that clarify the meaning of the photograph beyond the traditional cataloguing data provided by collecting institutions.

As more and more historical resources - like the digitised newspapers from the National Library of Australia's Trove Digitised Newspapers service -become widely available and easily searchable, it becomes easier to 'triangulate' the truth of the events surrounding at least some historical events and the images that seek to reflect them. Other sources of evidence of historical events depicted in images -historic sites, artefacts, books, journal articles, magazines and original documents in state archives -can also be used, although access to them is more constrained than sources that have been digitised and indexed for immediate retrieval through the internet.

Our understanding of the past is constantly being revised as new artefacts or other evidence come to light: "[h]istory is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past" wrote then-President of the American History Association James McPherson in 2003. Far from being a pejorative term," 'revisionism' -is what makes history vital and meaningfuJ."49 New resources now exposed for anyone to access over the internet give us a body of materials that can be summoned with a simple search query from anywhere on the internet. Provided that the institution holding the artefact has chosen to digitise it, no access to the physical artefact or institution is required, and no interpretation by intermediaries -other than the institution's decisions to digitise it-and make it publicly available online -need stand between the source material and the searcher.

When interpreting any evidence from the past -photographs, words, buildings or objects -one must be mindful that someone created them and they will have brought their own experiences and perspectives to the creation. To be sure of the truth, the viewer has to look beyond the single item, and reconstruct the past from a number of different perspectives of the same event.

There is truth in the historical photographs examined here. In each case the artefact is a trace of something that happened in front of the camera when the shutter was opened. Each one is the result -an artefact - of a deliberate process undertaken by the photographer. Why the photographer chose to capture that moment is open to

interpretation: interpretation that can be assisted by using the affordances of the internet to find relevant material to aid in that understanding. Much of the material that could be useful to aiding this interpretation, if it exists at all, is held in the collections of our

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national institutions. Much of this material is not yet available digitally, so for most of the community -those unable to access the collections physically - it will not be available to inform their understanding.50 Instead, they will rely on the interpretations of others or on

those materials that they can access electronically, and ignore the rest. Rather than be marginalized, these institutions have the opportunity to engage with the community beyond their physical locations, by digitising their collections, making them available on line in a form that can be indexed to aid search, and developing procedures to allow the community to engage actively with the materials to enhance the value of the collections for everyone.

so In her blog, Rose Holley of the NLA estimates that only 3% of the collections have been digitised. Holley, "Dealing with the Digital Deluge."

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Image and text

Even if it is a faithful reproduction of what occurred in front of the lens when it was captured, a photograph can mislead a viewer: more so if the photograph is presented to them within a wider context that moulds the viewer's understanding of what they are seeing. Photographs appear alone or with captions, sometimes in books with expansive descriptions surrounding them. Wherever present, the words frame the meaning of the photographs.

In 1994, Mitchell referred to "the age of electronic reproduction", doubtless referencing Walter Benjamin's age of mechanical reproduction,s1 and talked about "new forms of visual stimulation and illusionism with unprecedented powers".s2 I argue that in the 'age of electronic reproduction' there is a transition from considering photographs as artefacts to taking a wider perspective that takes into account the situation in which a viewer encounters a particular photograph: that the characteristics of each 'instance' of the photograph can be considered when investigating its power of 'visual stimulation and illusion ism'. An instance is the situation in which a viewer encounters a photograph: it may be a print in the collection of a gallery, library, archive or museum; it might be published as a reproduction in a book or physical catalogue; or it might be found online either through deliberate search or by chance while browsing. On the internet, photographs are created on demand by the viewer's browser from electronic bits stored on a server or held in a cache of memory somewhere: each instance is transient and can be considered unique.

The opportunities for a photograph being seen on the internet far exceed those that it might be seen in a gallery or in a book: there have been over 500,000 views of my own photographs on Panoramio, more than would be possible even if there were prints of them in an exhibition or they had been published in a book.SJ How considered each view of a photograph seen on the internet might be when compared with how a photograph encountered in an exhibition or in a book might be considered is open to debate.

In any particular instance of a photograph -whether a new form of electronic

reproduction on the internet, or viewing a print in a gallery -there will be a context within

51 Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (Penguin, 2008). s2 WJT Mitchell, "The Pictorial Turn," in Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation, ed. WJT Mitchell (Chicago: The University of Chicago, 1994), 15.

53 "Panoramic - Photos by James Steele," accessed 1 February 2014, http:/ /www.panoramio.com/user /5825 75.

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which the photograph is viewed. Labels, descriptions and captions; adjacent photographs

or other media; catalogue descriptions; text surrounding a photograph in a book or on a

web page: all these elements of an instance will have an impact on the viewer's experience

of a particular photograph. There are, for example, many instances of Mounted Constables

Willshire and Wurmbrand. Versions of the photograph can be found, for example, in an

exhibition catalogue; in a number of books; and on line (where in one instance it is

mistakenly attributed to Paul Foelsche).54 ln each instance, the surrounding context of the

photograph can have a different impact on the viewer's interpretation of its meaning.

In 1998, Jon Prosser lamented that little research into the role of the photograph in

research had been done, and encouraged researchers to explore image-based research

methods.ss His Sourcebook has gone through several editions, and is still available: now as

an electronic book.56 In 2001, Marcus Bank explored the use of the photograph in social

research in Visual Methods in Social Research.57 It was intended to provide social scientists

with information about how they could use visual images in their research, and why they

might want to.

While authors like Mitchell, Prosser and Bank give us a foundation for considering the role

of the photograph in research, the works cited above were written during the early years

of the growth of the internet, and before the advent of social networking sites and the

large increases in the number and range of personal photographs b-eing made, uploaded

and shared in what Mitchell describes as the post photographic era.SB More recently,

authors like Susan Murray and Jose Van Dijck may give us more insights into how

photographs experienced on the screen -hosted on remote servers - might be interpreted

today, and the different role photographs now play.59

s4 Royal Geographic Society of South Australia Inc., "Images of Aboriginal Australians 1773-1901"; Gael Newton, Shades of light: Photography and Australia, 1839-1988 (William Collins, with the Australian National Gallery, 1988); Allan Sierp, Colonial Life in South Australia, Fifty Years of Photography, 1855-1905. (Adelaide: Rigby, 1969); Peterson, "A Colonial Image"; Paul Foelsche (attr.), "Ah Kim's Capture," Unknown, http://www.territorystories.nt.gov.au/handle/10070/69362. ss Jon Prosser and Dona Schwartz, "Photographs within the Social Research Process," in Image -Based Research: A Sourcebookfor Qualitative Researchers, ed. Jon Prosser (Routledge, 1998). 56 Jon Prosser, Image-Based Research: A Sourcebookfor Qualitative Researchers KINDLE EDITION (Routledge, 2012), http://www.amazon.com/lmage-based-Research-Sour cebook-Qualitative-Resea rchers-ebook/ d p / BOOO PUB B LM / ref=tmm_kin_ti tle_O?ie= UTF8&q id= 1391214 243&sr=8-1. s7 Marcus Banks, Visual Methods in Social Research (SAGE, 2001).

ss WJT Mitchell, The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (MIT Press, 1994). 59 Susan Murray, "Digital Images, Photo-Sharing, and Our Shifting Notions of Everyday Aesthetics," journal of Visual Culture 7, no. 2 (1 August 2008): 147-163; Jose van Dijck, "Digital Photography: Communication, Identity, Memory," Visual Communication 7, no. 1 (1 February 2008): 57-76. While they deal with personal photographs being shared through social networking, they add to our understanding of how photographs are interpreted when seen online.

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In his introduction to Toward the Visualization of History: the Past as an Image, Mark Moss notes that students he taught "brought with them keen insights regarding the nature of history." Through questioning them, he "was informed that the majority of their inquiries and most of their foundations of historical knowledge were derived from film and television. The odd student even mentioned a photograph of some historical event ... " 60 If students are indeed gaining their keen insights into historical events through film, television, even photographs, then it is important to understand the mechanisms through which this happens, if for no other reason that to improve the structure of the situations in which students experience the materials that are giving them these insights.

Roland Barthes wrote, "the text loads the image, burdening it with a culture, a moral, and imagination."61 Wherever an image is found with text around it - which is generally the case -the text will add to the information the viewer has about the image, and it will influence the viewer's understanding of what is seen. According to Gunning, words are necessary for a photograph to be understood, since "[b]ereft of language, a photograph relies on people to say things about it or for it."62 Edwards reminds us that Barthes "suggested that the caption 'anchored' the image: that is to say, that the caption or headline tied the image down to a preferred interpretation .... meaning is not simply in the image."63 A photograph needs a narrative. Barth es explains that "the text directs the reader through the signifieds of the image, causing him to avoid some [meanings] and receive others; by means of an often subtle dispatching, it remote-controls him towards a meaning chosen in advance."64 Writing in 1987, Hunter says that, "[f]or good or bad, a photograph is always an object in a context, and the context is determined most obviously by the words next to the photograph".65 Today, that context is expanded by a wider set of metadata, especially electronic information that can be linked to a photograph.

According to the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative,

The word 'metadata' means 'data about data'. Metadata articulates a context for objects of

interest-'resources' such as MP3 files, library books, or satellite images-in the form of

60 Mark Moss, Toward the Visualization of History: The Past as Image (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008),

ix.

6J Roland Barthes, Image, Music, Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977), 26. 62 Gunning, "What's the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs," 42.

63 Edwards, Photography, 109.

64 Roland Barth es, "Rhetoric of the Image," in Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, Conn.: Leete's Island Books, 1980), 275.

6s Jefferson Hunter, Image and Word: The Interaction of Twentieth-Century Photographs and Texts

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 11.

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'resource descriptions'. As a tradition, resource description dates back to the earliest archives

and library catalogs.66

Metadata is a term used within collecting institutions to describe text that is used to help in the discoverability of items within their collections: the entries in a catalogue or index that helps visitors and staff find materials or resources. When library catalogues were physical card files, the cards were stored alphabetically by title and by author surname, limiting discoverability using metadata to the name of a resource (the title) or its creator (author). When cataloguing data is electronic and searchable, any text in the catalogue entry can be matched with a search term. With electronic catalogues, new forms of discovery beyond text searches are also possible: for example, using location metadata to plot items on a map to assist the discovery of resources associated with a particular geographic location (somewhat like looking at the books shelved around a relevant

volume in a library to find others that may be interesting).

In the case of a digital photograph, the visual trace is stored as data, ones and zeros: the picture is the data. The metadata includes not only the captions, titles and descriptions of the analogue age but goes further to include a range of digital information about the picture that can, for example, describe when and where it was taken, the brand and model of the camera used, the lens, the exposure settings, even if the flash fired. As descriptors or comments on the photograph itself, metadata are separate from th~ trace and provide the viewer with information that they can use to interpret what they see.

Some metadata -location, time and date, the camera settings, even a descriptive label (whether created by people or technology) - is indexical, a trace of the real that can reinforce comprehension. On the other hand, a caption at odds with the image, a description that misleads the viewer, or incorrect location or time information adds complexity to the viewer's interpretation of the image. Whether deliberate or unconscious, misleading metadata can lead to a different construction for the image than the

photograp~ on its own would allow for. Examples of how metadata can add complexity to a photograph are discussed later.

No longer does a viewer need to rely on just the image, captions, titles and descriptions, and on how others have interpreted the photograph to understand it. The image can be matched with others on the internet and the context within which these other instances of the image have been used can help with its interpretation, and the metadata can unlock

66 Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, "DCM! Metadata Basics," Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, 2013, http://dublincore.org/ m etadata-basics/.

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access to an extensive range of additional information on the internet that may help to

explain the photograph.

Figure

Fig. 1. Anon. Portrait of the Southwell family at Coo/amine Homestead, Snowy Moun tains, New South Wales, ca
Fig. 2. A Pioneer Settler, attributed to George Bell 1895-1900. Powerhouse Museum 85/1284· 777
Fig. 3. May, Mounted Constables Willshire ond Wurmbrand, with the Native Police in Camp, in Central Australia, 26th 1887
Fig. 4. Capture of Ah Kim at 10.20pm on the 11" May 1875. Paul Foelsche 1875. State Library of South Austra lia B 72247
+7

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