ABSTRACT
This chapter considers debates about colonialism and the archive through the lens of particular Australian Aboriginal photographic archives, assessing them both as an instrument of past power inequalities but also asking whether such archives might nevertheless be 'democratized'. It reviews the production and circulation of such images, beginning during the nineteenth century, before turning to their more recent transformations at the hands of Aboriginal people. The chapter traces changing ways of seeing these images – from the scientific and popular frameworks of the nineteenth century, through shifts in ideas about Aboriginal people starting in the 1930s and 1940s, through to present-day uses of these archival images by Indigenous people themselves. It examines the Indigenous significance of historical photographs as revealed through research with relatives and descendants of the images' subjects, and the very different uses to which they are put in the present.
