Across this large-scale triptych, Vernon Ah Kee has drawn portraits of his son and his grandfather, who appears on two of the three panels, accompanied by information on glass slides, as seen in anthropological photography. These historical portraits reference the work of anthropologist Norman B Tindale (1900–93) who, between the 1920s and early 1960s, photographed Aboriginal people from communities throughout Australia and recorded their genealogies. In 1974, Tindale published these images in his landmark study ‘Aboriginal Tribes of Australia: Their Terrain, Environmental Controls, Distribution, Limits and Proper Names’.

While Tindale’s photographs are now available to the subjects’ descendants, the images themselves are often cropped for display in museums to minimise their clinical, ethnographic qualities. Ah Kee has explained that he wanted to interrogate this practice, and to transform the portraits into images that foreground the beauty and humanity of Aboriginal peoples, achieved by re-contextualising the images of his family from scientific curiosity to self-determined portraiture through the inclusion of language groups.