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Accepted Paper:

Thick Photography  
Jennifer Deger (Charles Darwin University)

Paper short abstract:

Yolngu phone and tablet-based photography literally pulses with layered meaning and affect. Akin to bark painting—yet also deliberately different—these photos affirm the spectral density of Yolngu worlds. Following suit, I experiment between story, memory and photo-image.

Paper long abstract:

Across remote Aboriginal Australia, phone and tablet photographic technologies are giving rise to vibrant new forms of visual culture. Green-screen 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 post-produced 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 far exceeds the registers of what eye can see, the camera can capture and, indeed, what this anthropologist will ever know.

As photography gives new form (and new life) to existing cultural practices by enabling the assembling and activation of images (including song poetry and 'non-traditional' imagery incorporated from elsewhere), I hope that these new photographic practices will enable a new ethnographic form to my project of communicating just how centrally visual images and their spectral counterparts texture, shape and shadow life in Arnhem Land. Working the spaces between image, memory and narrative, this presentation aims to generate "thick description" of a different order to conventionally Geertzian-inspired ethnographies.

Panel P19
Aboriginal Photographies
  Session 1