Since its emergence, photography has been used in settler-colonial contexts to support racialised theories of the hierarchy of civilisation. Images were wielded as a deliberate tool to dehumanise Indigenous people – to rationalise their treatment and justify dispossession of their lands. Products of vastly unequal power relationships, these exploitative photographs objectified and sexualised Indigenous people and established enduring definitions of their culture. 

Once relegated to archives as evidentiary records of a ‘vanished’ people, anthropological photography can be recontextualised, remixed and recreated by artists to question its original aims and embedded authority. These works are powerful reclamations of individual, collective and cultural memory that infuse life back into the subjects of archival images and honour them as signifiers of survival. 

Artists like Genevieve Grieves, in her work Picturing the old people 2006–07, speak back to colonial modes of highly constructed, identity-making photographs, imitating and even mocking these manipulated displays and stereotyped mises en scène.   

Danie Mellor, in his ‘Perpetual’ series 2022, layers imagery of Country and people imbued with historical and cultural references. According to Mellor, he uses infrared photography and the materiality of polished steel to create works where ancestors are remembered within the ‘mirrored surface that proposes a liminal zone of reflection, somewhere between this world and the next’. 

Other artists delve into both institutional and familial archives, transforming photographs of their kin through performative gestures that create new meaning. These works are reconfigured instruments of memorialisation that reconnect stories, genealogies and memory to reverse colonial narratives and perspectives.