The photograph as archive: Crafting contemporary Koorie culture

Abstract

In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia, created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art/cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor wearing such adornment. In this article, I bring the necklace and the photograph into the same analytical frame, arguing for the photograph as an archive itself. I consider the trajectories through which the 19th-century image has been replicated and circulated in various productions of knowledge about Aboriginal people, and how a 21st-century artist is mobilizing it not just as a repository of visual information, but also as an impetus to creative production. She produces objects of value and is making culture anew, in a context in which Aboriginality has long/often been presumed absent, extinct or elsewhere.