Dissertation : photography and our connection with our culture, history and identity exegesis

Steele, James Robin

Dissertation : photography and our connection with our culture, history and identity exegesis

Date

2014

Authors

Steele, James Robin

Abstract

Photographs are used to reinforce arguments about our history, our culture, and our 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, what is the connection between even a single photograph and the basic truth of the reality it purports to represent? Focusing on geographic location, my research interest for my creative practice is in how photographs document and represent place. Place helps to define who we are. Place informs us about our past and about the foundations of our community and our culture. Photographs help to define place because they provide evidence for what is there, what was there, and what happened there. In my studio practice I explore the use of rephotography to highlight the differences in material form of place over time. The exhibition explores the place of the photograph in the modern world by comparing photographs taken in the past with those taken in the same places almost forty years later with a series of photographs taken in 1973 in and around Cronulla Street, south of Sydney, and rephotographs of the same scenes in 2011. They show sometimes subtle, sometimes clear, changes in our environment and behaviour that go unnoticed without photographic evidence. To better understand what the photographs in my exhibition are actually saying to us, and to explore what photographs from the past actually tell us, for my dissertation I examined a number of photographs from a more distant, nineteenth or early twentieth century past that proved to be ambiguous. On the basis of my research, I argue that the model of the nineteenth century photograph as an indexical truth, modulated by cultural interpretation, is more complex than is generally thought. Online access to substantially expanded resources through more sophisticated digital tools today shows clearly that the staged photographs should not be considered as 'false' simply because they are not documents of true events. They give us access to the way people then constructed their reality. This offers us useful information about the way they thought about themselves and their society. I also argue that online digital tools, the resources they allow us to access easily, and the opportunities provided by the internet to interact with each other change the rules significantly for Australian institutions of photographic history - galleries, libraries, archives and museums. These institutions are yet to realise the implications of these changed rules, and to embrace the opportunities provided by them to engage actively with individual researchers.