Ethical witnessing and the portrait photograph: Brook Andrew

Abstract

This paper is driven by an enquiry into how meaning changes when an ethnographic portrait photograph is rematerialised and recontextualised into a contemporary art work. The currency of portrait photographs of First Australians in nineteenth century settler society emanated from a limited range of discourses which shut meaning down and restricted interpretation. These meanings were facilitated by the photograph's materiality. As small paper-based objects, portrait photographs of Aboriginal men and women circulated in knowledge economies around Australia and abroad, where they were consumed as factual evidence of racial difference. This facilitated a dehumanising gaze that largely reduced those depicted to the status of specimens of scientific enquiry. This article considers the photo-media interventions of Brook Andrew who reworks portraits of First Australians to reposition the viewer as an ethical witness. By fundamentally altering the materiality of the photographs Andrew transforms the viewer's encounter with the portrait, revoking the ethnographic gaze and mobilising a moral response where witnessing can become an answerable act.