The Photograph as Archive, Reimagining the Archive, the Living Archive of Aboriginal Art

Abstract

In 2008, an Indigenous Australian artist based in Melbourne – Maree Clarke (Mutti Mutti/ Wemba Wemba/Boonwurrung) – created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art and cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor – Yarruun Parpur Tarneen – wearing such adornment, and by visiting with extant examples of such adornment in museums around the world. This photo-essay seeks to both represent Clarke’s collaborative work, and invite others in to learn, share, and co-create. We argue that photographs are archives themselves: sites and sources of creative co-production. Photographs are inextricable from their people and their relations (with Ancestors, Country, kin, and community). The holistic integration of Indigenous knowledge transmission, contemporary art-making, archival photographs, and extant artifacts offers a radical re-imagination of what archives are and can do.