Photography’s afterlife: Documentary images and the operational archive

1 The death and afterlife of photography

During the 1980s the ‘death of photography’ was announced with enough regularity to make it seem a fait accompli. Influential books such as Fred Ritchin’s In Our Own Image: The Coming Revolution in Photography and Andy Grunberg’s Crisis of the Real, both published in 1990, typified the pessimistic mood concerning the future of photography’s evidentiary value. Ritchin, a former picture editor of The New York Times Magazine, went as far as claiming that the special effects work of Lucasfilm implied ‘the end of photography as evidence for anything’. In his well-known book on visual culture, Nicholas Mirzoeff (1999: 86) summed up the ambit claims of the period:

After a century and a half of recording and memorializing death, photography met its own death some time in the 1980s at the hands of computer imaging. The ability to alter a photograph digitally has undone the fundamental condition of photography – that something must have been in front of the lens when the shutter opened, even if questions remained as to the ‘authenticity’ of what was recorded. It is now possible to create ‘photographs’ of scenes that never existed without the fakery being directly observable … The point is, the photograph is no longer an index of reality.

There are several problems with aligning this apparently terminal crisis of photographic credibility with the emergence of digital photography. First, new protocols to deal with the use of photographs in limited professional contexts, such as the presentation of evidence in court, or the labelling of photoshopped images in journalism, soon evolved. Second, and more seriously, it is difficult to accept that we could ever trust analogue photography in the simple, positivistic sense assumed by much of the discourse lamenting its digital demise. This point had been established well prior to the general uptake of digital technologies, not least in the substantial body of work from writers as diverse as Susan Sontag (1977), John Berger (1984), Alan Sekula (1986), John Tagg (1988) and Trinh Minh-Ha (1992), which collectively treated issues of context, framing and institutional power as critical in constructing the evidentiary value of photographs.

This is not to say that all the questions raised by the transition to digital imaging have been resolved, even in limited professional contexts such as newspaper photography. Rather, it is to acknowledge that the sense of crisis that inspired the ‘death of photography’ rhetoric has dissipated. What is perhaps most fascinating about looking back on the discourse from this time is not simply that it proved to be exaggerated – this happens so often in relation to the uptake of new image technologies that it should be expected – but that the discussions almost entirely missed what could be said to be the real transformation produced by digital photography. Arguably, this is less about the demise of referentiality or the loss of evidentiary value than the integration of photography into the network milieu.

This integration follows a number of fronts, including the emergence of cheap digital cameras, the growth of internet bandwidth enabling rapid, low-cost distribution, and the creation of online applications and services for image storage. As imaging technologies have become more widely distributed, as the cost of image capture and circulation has fallen in line with other forms of information processing and as new means of archiving have developed, the cumulative result has been the emergence of a different set of questions around photographic practices and protocols.

Today, Kodak is bankrupt, its digital imaging patents swallowed at the end of 2012 by tech giants including Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon, and Facebook has accumulated the largest image archive the world has ever seen. The most popular ‘camera’ for posting images on Flickr is the iPhone 4S (Flickr, 2012a). YouTube reports that its users upload 72 hours of video to the site every minute (YouTube, 2013). If photography is dead, it is clearly a case of over-exposure. In photography’s digital afterlife, everyone is an image-maker, but also, potentially, a publisher and archivist.

In this article, I want to consider how changes in the conditions of production, circulation and storage offer new possibilities for deploying visual images as cultural and political resources. The crux of the problem is this: how do we remain open to the possibilities for a different politics of representation opened by the digital milieu without simply accepting the current bargain enacted by powerful image brokers (both older public institutions and newer private ones) in the emerging era of ‘big data’? This is particularly the case if we want to think about the resources that digital imaging might offer previously marginalized actors, such as indigenous peoples, in developing new capacities for self-organized representation.

2 Photography in the digital milieu

While there are clear technical differences in how digital and analogue images are captured and stored (Mitchell, 1992), it is important not to frame the impact of these differences in narrowly deterministic ways. At one level, the end result – a picture – remains much the same for viewers. Despite the claims of Ritchin and others, the indexical value of the photographic image retains a powerful currency (Osbourne, 2010). I will return to this point later.

Nevertheless, the fact that the photograph as picture is now more commonly encountered on a screen rather than, say, as a paper print held in the hand, is hugely important. It is closely related to the first aspect of the digital milieu that I want to emphasize, which is the new scale of image production. Far greater numbers of people are routinely carrying cameras in the course of their everyday life, most often incorporated in ‘phones’, and this is creating exponential growth in the number of photographs captured. Whereas amateur photography was once reserved for special occasions (prototypically the family milestones reported by Bourdieu et al., 1990[1965], in their famous study), it is now commonplace for everyday practices to be extensively photographed by those involved in them. One of the lines separating the amateur and the professional photographer used to be shooting ratios; amateurs might take one or two shots while professionals would shoot roll after roll of film and select their shots later. In a recent discussion, some of my students reported routinely taking as many as 500 images during what they described as an ordinary night out. Since there is almost no upfront cost in capturing digital images, everyone just keeps shooting. A key dividing line between analogue and digital photography as cultural practices concerns the way that wider access to low-cost image capture has been parlayed into a willingness to carry and use cameras in more and more situations.

Cheap, easy and accessible capture is one key aspect of the digital milieu. The second trajectory I want to emphasize here is the impact of widely available, notionally ‘free’ modes of networked distribution and storage characterized by global extension and instantaneity. Like so many others, the images produced by my students are immediately uploaded to Facebook where they enjoy a curious visibility; neither entirely public nor yet private in the traditional sense of either term. As Van Dijck (2011: 407) notes, a new default of photo ‘sharing’ has emerged in the digital milieu:

Until the 1990s, sharing laminated pictures and stories was indeed a shared social experience conducted commonly within the social circles of family and friends. Very few pictures were actively exchanged beyond those private circles, but this changed as soon as digital cameras penetrated the markets of amateur photography.

Sharing images online makes it more difficult to maintain control over access and use. Even if they are posted to Facebook with restricted access settings, the fact that ‘friends’ can grant access to their friends enrols the shared image in a chain of uncertain proportions. Deleted images have proved difficult to really remove (Cheng, 2012). And of course, Facebook itself always has access to even the most private photo albums on its site.

The availability of growing storage volume through online platforms has shifted another default: it is now far easier to keep all images than to sift them with an eye to culling. In their early study of online photo storage, Van House and Churchill (2008: 300) noted: ‘Research suggests we seldom throw materials away. Accumulation is easier than sorting and selecting, deletion is less common than accretion.’ At the same time, networked photography is accruing a new temporality. Photography is becoming less about capturing ‘memories’ (as Kodak famously phrased it in the 20th century) than about commenting on present events as they are taking place. Van House (in Van House and Churchill, 2008) argues that images made by camera phones are less ‘archival’: ‘many are treated as ephemeral and transitory, including being used for image-based communication, in effect visual or multimodal messaging’. Treatment of the networked image as ephemeral is not without tensions. Even if not intended to form an archive, these images nevertheless accumulate in vast online databases. The new temporality of networked practices is tied to what Hoskins (2009) has dubbed ‘new memory’ and what I will take up below as the ‘operational archive’.

Photography in the digital milieu can thus be broadly characterized in terms of the vastly expanded scale and range of image production coupled to the new logistics of hyper-circulation. A range of new ‘evidencing’ practices, from intensive self and peer scrutiny via social networks to more politically oriented modes of ‘witnessing’ such as ‘citizen journalism’ have emerged out of such a shift. While this condition opens questions in many directions, here I am particularly interested in the impact on how images ‘mean’: how they testify to experience, how they accrue social and cultural value as evidence, how they might achieve political leverage. I want to break this down to consider two related processes, one concerning the responsibility of photographers and the other the responsibility of viewers. I will argue that, if photographers desire to make meaningful images in conditions of over-production and over-exposure, their stance towards what they are photographing remains critical. However, the photographer’s stance cannot guarantee the function of an image. How these images are later read and interpreted will depend on the interaction of different layers of what might be broadly called context, including the circumstances of the event depicted, the historical conjuncture in which the resulting image is deployed, the institutional environment in which it is displayed or archived, the cultural knowledge of the particular viewer who sees it, and so on. If the digital threshold seems less central in influencing the photographer’s stance, it is increasingly important in the determination of context.

3 Photographic meaning and the problem of context

In approaching the issue of photographic meaning through these different but related vectors, my underlying argument is that images – even analogue photographic images carrying Barthes’ (1984) obstinate imprint ‘this has been’ – do not have fixed or settled meanings. Meaning is always transactive: it is the result of complex and dynamic processes of interpretation, contestation and translation. Evidence and testimony is always to be actively produced in the complex present. The need to continually restate such a point relates to one of the defining paradoxes of the technological image, evident at least since the industrialization of photography in the 1880s. This concerns the photograph’s combination of unprecedented visual detail, which seems to anchor the image in a particular time and place, coupled to the endless capacity for images to travel into new times and places. In the 1980s, John Berger (Berger and Mohr, 1982: 51) posed the relation between photography and memory in the following terms:

Photographs preserve instant appearances. Habit now protects us against the shock involved in such preservation. Compare the exposure time of a film with the life of the print made, and let us assume the print only lasts for ten years: the ratio for an average modern photograph would be approximately 20,000,000 to 1. Perhaps that can serve as a reminder of the violence of the fission whereby appearances are separated by the camera from their function.

Berger’s observation does not stand up as mathematics, but it does serve to dramatize the way the unprecedented temporality of photography changed our relation to the visible. The combination of abrupt capture – photography might be said to introduce the sampling of the event – and promiscuous circulation is what makes photography’s claim to truth so fraught and contested. In relation to the argument I am making here, it underlines the extent to which the evidentiary value of photographic images is not simply a function of whether or not pixel by pixel manipulation enables the seamless modification of appearances beyond the threshold of human perception, as Mirzoeff suggested, but depends on the protocols that are developed to respond to the images’ capacity to travel into new contexts.

This issue has been central to long-standing arguments over the stability of photographic meaning. Separation between the moment represented and the moment of viewing has fuelled myriad debates and controversies, and photographic history is littered with images that have their meaning altered by entry into a new setting. Loss of context is the fundamental danger that animates Susan Sontag’s (1977: 71) insightful but ultimately pessimistic elegy on photography. She argues: ‘A photograph is only a fragment, and with the passage of time its moorings come unstuck. It drifts away into a soft abstract pastness, open to any kind of reading.’ Following this logic, Sontag ends up being quite dismissive of the capacity for any image to make a difference in political and social terms, declaring instead her preference for words and narrative. Digital images, with their ease of copying, susceptibility to manipulation and potential for rapid circulation, accentuate this condition. And when every famous image – and many ordinary ones – seems to end up in the global maw of advertising, it is all too easy to become cynical about photography in general.

The frequent abuse of images has often led to demands for ‘restoring’ the context of a photograph in order that its evidence can be read properly. While this is an understandable response to photographic excess, it is a demand that needs to be carefully negotiated. Too often when we talk about ‘context’ in relation to a photograph, it is as if there is a finite set of connections that might be fully reproduced, if only we had the time or resources. In other words, the polysemy of the image is given a cursory and limited acknowledgement, in the hope that it can be thereby tamed. Rather than this partial, rather defensive acknowledgement of the fragility of meaning, I am arguing that we need to begin with acceptance of the irreducible openness of technological images. This quality is integrally related to the capacity of any image to circulate and appear in new situations (McQuire, 1998). Acknowledging the impossibility of ‘locking down’ context is not to simply accept Sontag’s grey future of endlessly drifting meanings, but to argue for the need to shift focus from protocols of retrieval to those of construction. In other words, interpreting an image is never a matter of simply ‘restoring’ some original context, as if there is only one, but is an undertaking that will always remain unfinished. It has to be revisited time and again in the particularity of the moment. If this understanding runs against the formalist grain that has dominated art history as a discipline and so coloured our understanding of photographic practice, it seems indispensable to developing a more productive understanding of the politics of the image in the digital milieu.

The corollary to this argument is that the ethical responsibility of the photographer towards those being photographed must be complemented by the ethical responsibility of viewers to actively read images in a manner that goes beyond mere formalism. If accepting such responsibility frequently demands breaking with the dominant institutional protocols of the mainstream media and the museum, it forms a key pillar of what Sontag (1977: 180) once evoked as an ‘ecology’ of images. In her distinction between ‘canon’ and ‘archive’ as different modalities of cultural memory, Aleida Assmann (2008: 98) contrasts active and passive memory: ‘The institutions of active memory preserve the past as present while the institutions of passive memory preserve the past as past.’ It remains to be considered below how the new digital archives might intersect with and alter this dynamic.

4 The act of photographic documentation

Over the last three decades, renowned documentary photographer Ricky Maynard has produced an exemplary body of photographs depicting diverse aspects of the lives of Australian Aboriginal peoples. Maynard’s work has consistently demonstrated the capacity to achieve a delicate balance between capturing the detailed grain of interrelationships between specific people, practices and places, while at the same time reaching beyond the immediate conditions in which his images are nevertheless anchored. I would argue that it is the ability to accommodate this unstable equilibrium between aesthetics, empathy and politics that is critical to great documentary photography. But what I want to emphasize here is the way Maynard’s approach grows out of the uneven conditions of photographic history, particularly as manifested in Australian history.

When my colleague Tony Birch worked on a project with Museum Victoria in 1996, he described his search to find archival images showing the richness and diversity of the Koori community.

Many of the images I looked at, particularly those taken in the nineteenth century, had been produced in an institutional framework. Koori people appear before the camera lens at government reserves and missions, or in the portrait studios of commissioned photographers … On surveying the photographic collections held in the Museum, it became clear to me that some of the photographers who had ‘captured’ images of Koori people were either ignorant of, or avoided recognizing, the value of the lives and histories of our people. (Birch, 2000: vii)

Birch’s observation reflects a critical fact of photographic history: access to the means of image production has been divided and unequal, and for a long time the camera functioned as a key tool of colonial power. This is not to argue that photographic output from this period is therefore homogeneous, but to note that structural disenfranchisement has lasting effects in terms of image archives. In Australia, the division between photographers and their ‘subjects’ was most marked in the 19th century, but persisted in some respects right up to the 1970s. Maynard’s practice is directly shaped by this experience. Maynard, who was brought into the Museum Victoria project to produce a new body of work documenting contemporary Koori life, began a traineeship as a photographer at AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) in 1983. One of his tasks was to catalogue early photographs of Aboriginal Australians. He later wrote of the experience: ‘I looked into the faces of all those people and it was so sad. I started questioning the photographer’s role, the influence of the image and its pervasive nature’ (quoted in Kent, 2005: 111). Since that time, Maynard has focused on establishing an alternative photographic practice rooted in what he calls ‘convivial photography’:

Standard photographic technique is essentially an act of subjugation, in which people are inevitably reduced to objects for the use of the photographer … To build an alternative practice, a convivial photography, we need to abolish this oppressive relationship. Co-authorship must be established beforehand. It is impossible to fight oppression by reproducing it. (quoted in Gough, 1997: 114)

Attributes of this kind of ethical stance have been recognized by other photographers – for example, Jean Mohr long ago argued that photojournalists should not regard their first duty as reporting to a general audience, but as reporting for those they are photographing. (He also adds that this stance is not well supported in the industry: ‘There are many reasons for not taking images. But if you are a press photographer your employers will recognize none’ [in Berger and Mohr, 1982: 78].) However, Maynard places co-authorship at the centre of his practice in a deeper way. On the one hand, ‘co-authorship’ involves gaining and respecting the trust of those he photographs. The classical and still prevalent image of the photographer as an outsider on the prowl for good shots gives way to what George Marcus (1998) calls ‘epistemic partnership’ in which a meaningful outcome is not the result of the photographer acting upon those photographed, but acting in concert with them.

While this is not the way in which photography is often practised, there have been some notable examples. For instance, the After 200 Years project, curated by Penny Taylor (1988), in which Maynard first came to public notice, established a series of conceptual frameworks and practical guidelines for photographers working in Aboriginal communities in Australia. Commissioned by AIATSIS in 1985 for the so-called Australian Bicentennial of 1988 – in fact, marking 200 years since the establishment of the colony of New South Wales – After 200 Years was an ambitious project seeking to portray contemporary life in diverse Aboriginal communities across Australia. All 21 participating photographers (of whom 8 were Aboriginal) were required to engage with Aboriginal communities through a series of protocols. These included anthropologist Eric Michaels’ ‘primer’ on the cultural context of picture taking in Aboriginal communities (reproduced in Taylor, 1988); the provision of a lengthy time frame for producing the images, including a period for living in communities without taking photographs; the development of frameworks for extensive community discussion and feedback as to what could and should be shown; and vesting control over display and ownership of images in the communities.

While the implementation of such protocols is not specific to either analogue or digital photography, it does suggest how we might return to the question of authenticity and testimony in a different way – not according to the dominant tradition of Western philosophy, which valorizes ‘truth in representation’ in terms of adequation of the image (Derrida, 1981: 184–194), but as process: a matter of doing things the ‘proper way’. For Maynard, this demand determines a second level of ‘co-authorship’, one that involves responsibility not only to the living but also to the dead. This further distinguishes the ethics of his convivial photography from that proposed by Jean Mohr. Let me explain with reference to a particular image.

Maynard’s photograph ‘Broken Heart’ from the Portrait of a Distant Land series (2005, see Figure 1) shows the photographer himself standing knee-deep in the sea. His back is to the camera, his gaze fixed on the horizon. The image is classically composed with the horizon line dividing sea and sky at the ‘golden mean’, the photographer’s head resting gently on this line. If the sea and sky are peaceful, there is something about the photographer’s stance – the far-off yet purposeful gaze, the water line soaking his pants, the way his arms and hands seem held in suspension, neither actively grasping nor yet at rest – that conveys a deep sense of longing. The caption to the image, which is integral to producing its context of interpretation, reads: When we left our own place we were plenty of People, we are now but a little one. It is an excerpt from the 1846 Jeanneret petition to Queen Victoria signed by eight Aboriginal leaders, survivors of the hundreds removed from mainland Tasmania to Flinders Island in 1833. Maynard’s family has a longstanding association with the area. For the After 200 Years project Maynard produced The Moon Bird People series, depicting contemporary members of his community during the culturally important practice of mutton-bird hunting. The images testify to the continuity of cultural practices, to the triumph of survival in the face of great odds. ‘Broken Heart’ is focused on another dimension of the present: the ongoing legacy of violent displacement. Maynard recounts that he spent a year walking the coast of the island to make sure that he stood exactly where he thought his people would have, looking with longing at their homeland across the sea.

For me, the aim is to show authenticity in the work. In order to achieve that authenticity you have to have a solid base. It’s something that I strive for in every image, in every part of the story. It is important to be able to say, ‘yes I was here’. (Munro et al., 2007: 94)

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Ricky Maynard, Broken Heart, 2005, from the series Portrait of a Distant Land. © Copyright Ricky Maynard / Courtesy of Stills Gallery / Licensed by Viscopy, 2012.

Part of the quiet power of this image is its evocation of a different temporality. Maynard’s image is testament to a history that has happened but also to the way that it is still happening. It testifies to the ways in which the past lives on in the present, embodied in cultural practices, in collective memory, in individual acts of homage. It evokes the presentness of ancestors which remains potent for many Aboriginal people, but passes unacknowledged and too often suppressed in dominant Australian culture. It reminds us that the past only ever truly ceases to be present if the living refuse their responsibility towards it.

Looking at this photograph online – a digital translation of an analogue image – is doubtless different to seeing a silver gelatine print made from Maynard’s negative. Nevertheless, as a picture, such an image deftly dispels the exaggerated claim that digital images lack the capacity to testify, to provide evidence of authentic experience, to provoke meaningful encounters with viewers. Does this mean nothing has changed? Hardly. The more pressing concern – as, arguably, it ever was – is how the new conditions of networked access are reconfiguring viewing practices. How can we build interpretative frameworks that allow images sufficient play so that they are not reduced to the brute fact of pseudo-positivist evidence (as so often in a newspaper), but nevertheless provide enough support so they do not simply float free without connection to those they depict or to the conditions of their creation?

5 The operational archive

One of the key spaces in which this tension plays out in the present is the digitization of photographic archives held in public institutions such as museums, art galleries and libraries. While digitization is generally undertaken with the ambition of ‘opening up’ access to broader audiences, it raises a host of thorny issues in relation to images of indigenous peoples that are held in these collections. For indigenous peoples needing to creatively support their diverse ways of life in the face of global capitalism, developing new forms of self-organized representation is widely recognized as a critical tool. However, imaging lives in the present cannot be divorced from how they have been imaged in the past. The same photographic history that animates Maynard’s stance towards documentary photography situates the strong interest displayed by other contemporary Aboriginal photographers in ‘re-interpreting’ the archive. Numerous artists working with photographic images, including Leah King-Smith, Brenda Croft, Rea, Tracey Moffat, Destiny Deacon, Brook Andrew, Vernon Ah Kee, Julie Gough and Fiona Foley, have taken on this task in different ways. Collectively, this body of work underlines the fact that the archive is not simply about the past but is a matter of concern in the present. As I have argued throughout this article, this presentness of the archive has become more acute as the archive goes online.

Andrew Hoskins (2009: 92) argued that digital media are producing not only new metaphors but a new paradigm of memory: ‘The very use of these [file sharing] systems contributes to a new memory – an emergent digital network memory – in that communications themselves dynamically add to, alter and erase, a kind of living archival memory.’

The key insight I take from Hoskins is that ‘new memory’ is continually emergent or, to adopt a software-inspired metaphor, produced ‘on-the-fly’. To this I would want to add that memory has always had emergent qualities; instabilities that are only foreclosed by particular investments in a static, reproducible past capable of being seized objectively – which is to say, invested with the power of ‘truth’. From this perspective, what is significant about the socio-technical practices that are accruing around digital networks is their tendency to foreground emergence as a general condition of the archive, a threshold Wolfgang Ernst (2004) characterizes as a shift ‘from archival space to archival time’ (p. 46), from the archive as ‘vault’ to ‘permanent data transfer’ (pp. 49–50).

It is this nexus of the digital image with the networking of institutional archives that forms what I want to call the operational archive. The operational archive is clearly ‘active’ in Assmann’s (2008) sense. And, as I will argue below, this move is critical in re-imagining the use of institutional archives. However, I also want to argue that it is impossible to simply map a politically progressive sense of ‘active’ onto the roll-out of digital technologies. Operationality, as I understand it here, is an ambivalent and double-edged quality. On the one hand, it describes a shift in both conceptual understanding and practical operation, as the archive comes to be treated less as an inert and closed repository than as a set of elements demanding dynamic management. But while archives around the world are now being digitized with the ambition of making collections more accessible, including seeking new modes of interaction with the public under the rubric of ‘participation’, this heading is closely correlated with the way that archives are themselves becoming a tool for gathering information about their users.

For this reason, I argue that investigation of the archive inevitably carries dual imperatives in the present. On the one hand, there is a need to work out how we might use new technologies to address the lingering structural inequalities that have defined colonial history. At the same time, we also need to think about the new lines of power being propagated by the often poorly understood network architectures and technological protocols even as they are implemented. As Van House and Churchill (2008: 296) note:

Many people are unaware of the complex technical, institutional and political decisions that determine the nature of our archives. Decisions that are being instantiated in digital memory technologies now may be what Bowker (2005) calls ‘inaugural acts’, whereupon the new overwrites or supersedes the old.

The difficulty of neatly separating the technical from the social, the economic, the cultural and the political in such contexts is precisely what underwrites current attempts to think their mutual implication in terms of heterogeneous assemblages of ‘actants’ (for example, Latour, 2005). In terms of the specific argument I am making here, the ambivalence of the operational archive appears in the uncertain intersection between new desires for ‘openness’, the countervailing need to respect different cultural protocols for exchanging knowledge and the complex imperatives of large-scale digital archives operated by traditional public institutions and, increasingly, by private companies such as Facebook.

6 Working with the operational archive

One of the key issues that institutions need to consider in relation to collections of historical images is how the unequal history of their production has materially affected their content. For instance, how do you deal with images that depict indigenous peoples in offensive, stereotypical ways? While digital display has new potential for augmenting images (with text, with links, with other data) as they are displayed online, what happens when basic information is absent, simply because it was not considered important at the time the image was produced? It is extremely common that catalogues of 19th-century photographs of Australian Aboriginal peoples will record the name of the photographer, but not of the people photographed. This also reflects the legal status of images where copyright was conventionally vested in the photographer or holding institution rather than in the people photographed. Many image collections, in Australia and elsewhere, are grappling with such issues. The State Library of Victoria – which holds an extensive archive of colonial images of Aboriginal Australians similar to those examined by Tony Birch in 1996 – provides access to a number of the images online. While the images are displayed unaltered, access is now prefaced by a pop-up window headlined ‘Conditions of use – culturally sensitive material’ (SLV, 2012):

The State Library of Victoria is providing access to this work to support creativity, innovation and knowledge-exchange. The State Library of Victoria does not endorse or support any derogatory uses of this work.

The State Library of Victoria advises that the subject of this work may include images and names of deceased people; it may also include words and descriptive terms that may be offensive to Indigenous Australians. This work is presented as part of the record of the past; contemporary users should interpret the work within that context. Users are also advised that this work may be subject to terms and conditions imposed by Indigenous communities and/or depositors. For further information please contact pics@slv.vic.gov.au . In using this work you agree to acknowledge the State Library of Victoria as the source of the work.

This statement recognizes a number of issues that are pertinent here, including the fact that making images available in this way leaves them susceptible to copying and transportation to new, potentially offensive contexts; that the colonial context of production has materially affected the content of the images; and that different cultural protocols (for instance relating to recently deceased people) need to be recognized. It further recognizes that rights of Aboriginal communities in regulating the use of images may extend beyond the legal rights that are vested in the photographer (if the image is subject to copyright) or in the holding institution.

In most contemporary debates about digital networks, there is a widespread presumption that ‘access’ – to images, to knowledge, to data – is a good thing. However, such a presumption remains historically and culturally distinct. As Maxine Briggs (Koori liaison officer at the State Library of Victoria) puts it:

Availability and access are some of the major tenets for libraries with archival material in their collection, but these rules are diametrically opposed to the Aboriginal notion of information being made available only to those who have a right to view it or know. (Briggs et al., 2010: 121)

In the primer he developed for the After 200 Years project, Eric Michaels highlighted the difference between the modern Western emphasis on the social and economic value of wide circulation of images in time and space, and the Aboriginal Australian tradition based on circumscription of knowledge and regulation of access to according position within kinship networks. In fact, the ‘Western tradition’ concerning circulation of knowledge has never been unconditional or uniform. This is clear in current debates about access to digital content, which have become the site of intense disputation between various content owners, who view content primarily as an economic asset to be monetized, and others who seek to maintain the tradition of a ‘knowledge commons’ (Lessig, 2004) or to radically extend it by making all information ‘free’. Aboriginal knowledge systems cut across the dominant terms of these debates, fitting neither the ‘free’ nor the ‘knowledge as commodity’ camps. This indicates one difficulty of cultural translation in a global society dominated by market fundamentalism: while there is widespread acceptance of differential access based on capacity to pay, it seems we are not so used to differential access based on permission to ‘know’.

Demands for differentiated access protocols can arguably be more easily met in the new context of digital networks than in relation to traditional collections of perishable objects and images. A well-known example in Australia is the Ara Irititja project initiated by the Pitjantatjara Council, which has been running for nearly 20 years and now houses over 100,000 cultural items. Ara Irititja has pioneered collaborative approaches between communities, archivists and software developers to provide access protocols with the aim of facilitating community control over heritage, including making ‘lost’ material available to communities (see http://www.irititja.com/ ). However, where Ara Irititja is a restricted-access, community-facing network, picture collections such as that held by the SLV are required to service the ‘general public’.

The SLV’s creation of the position of Koori liaison officer in 2008 was closely connected with the ongoing process of the digitization of its collection of photographs of Aboriginal Australians. The ambition behind such a role is partly to bring these images into greater contact with descendant communities. A key advantage of the greater mobility of digital images is the increased capacity to repatriate them and to distribute them to people who might not be comfortable in, or familiar with, a library environment. Brokering better relations between archival institutions and descendant communities has the potential for benefits to flow both ways. Communities can obtain access to valuable cultural resources for remembering and reconnecting family, an undertaking that has huge and ongoing political importance in Australia because of the strategic value of photographs in establishing authority in Native Title claims. Institutions can gain material help in identifying images and in managing collections, not only augmenting the data around collections but also suppressing secret/sacred images where appropriate.

It is instructive to compare the ways in which historical images from the SLV collection appear in other websites, such as the ‘Mission Voices’ website hosted by the national broadcaster, ABC, produced in conjunction with the Koorie Heritage Trust and the SLV. Presentation of historical images of Aboriginal people on this site departs the SLV policy to ‘present material as it is’ in favour of deliberate modification of the archive, registered by the caveat: ‘The State Library of Victoria would like to advise users that some of the titles of collection items seen on this site could have been altered to respect Aboriginal cultural sensitivities’ (ABC, 2012). In contrast to the emphasis on preserving the historical record as it stands, which still owes much to the Rankean ambition to see the past ‘as it really was’, greater weight is given to enabling Aboriginal people to develop a self-determined and self-reflexive narrative in which contentious colonial images are recontextualized by first-person oral testimony and other documentary material. Here, the ‘operationality’ of the digital archive becomes a lever for partially realigning the skewed power relations that shaped the traditional archive’s formation.

The Koorie Heritage Trust project manager for Mission Voices was Genevieve Grieves, who had previously worked as an oral historian assisting members of the Stolen Generations to reconnect with their lost culture and families. In 2005, Grieves received one of the SLV’s Creative Fellowships during which she produced a five-channel video installation, Picturing the Old People. The project addresses the political conditions of the image archive in two ways. First, because Grieves offers an incisive analysis of the power relations embodied in the 19th-century photographic studio in which Aboriginal people became popular subjects. The video work creates a series of vignettes based on the styles of colonial photographers including JW Lindt, Richard Daintree and Carl Walter, but in each instance the initial conditions are transformed by interventions from Koori people. For example, in one sequence the two young ‘warriors’ leave their poses and begin to move independently, laying down a new beat, while the photographer is drawn into a comical dance. I do not want to limit this sequence to a simple narrative of transcendence – it is slow moving, and, like the work as a whole, depends heavily on a layered soundtrack that shifts the ambiance at critical moments. But what I do want to underline is Grieves’ presentation of Aboriginal people as neither untouched primitives or inert victims. Instead, she asks viewers to bear witness to the politics of photography and to consider the ways in which the relation between viewed and viewer might be adjusted.

This highlights the second level on which her work functions. A positive facet of the condition I am calling the operational archive is that institutions such as museums, libraries and art galleries are increasingly forced to take responsibility for their role as co-producers of the archive’s content, including its conditions of access and understanding. The SLV’s Creative Fellowship scheme through which Grieves produced Picturing the Old People is an outcome of this changed understanding. Enabling artists to produce creative works from the archives becomes an avenue along which the dead weight of history can be leavened by an awareness of the need to revisit the protocols of its construction.

7 Images in the age of ‘big data’

This shift bears on the final example I want to discuss here, which concerns how historical images of Aboriginal people appear on ‘The Commons’ website hosted by Flickr (2012b). This example demonstrates further ambivalent dimensions of the operationality of the archive, underlining the fact that such a condition does not correspond to a single political valence. While the SLV does not currently participate in ‘The Commons’ project, a number of its peer institutions do, including the State Libraries of Queensland and New South Wales, alongside other major institutions such as the Smithsonian, the US Library of Congress, and the National Libraries of Australia, Scotland and Ireland. The Commons (Flickr, 2012a) advertises two main objectives:

While the rationale is couched in the now common terms of greater access and new forms of participation, the growth of sites such as The Commons raises a series of questions about the ethics of placing public archives on services hosted by private companies (Flickr is owned by US internet giant Yahoo). Public institutions are undoubtedly motivated by a desire to put their collections where ‘the people’ are. But the terms of this bargain demand further analysis. For instance, while a number of historical images of Aboriginal Australians appear on The Commons, there is no recognition of the historical conditions in which these images were produced. There is nothing like the ‘conditions of use’ pop-up window on the SLV site, nor is there any reference to specific Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property rights or to collection protocols, such as those developed by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network, which have been widely adopted by public institutions in Australia (ATSILIRN, 2012). While such rights are poorly understood in the general community, their existence is integral to shifting understanding towards recognition that photographic archives belong to present custodians rather than to the apparently settled past of an abstract history. In this respect, The Commons represents a significant step backward, insofar as the only ‘guidelines’ for image use relate to narrowly construed laws of copyright rather than to more nuanced cultural protocols.

Privately owned photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and social network platforms such as Facebook are rapidly becoming a dominant form of distributing images. These sites have accumulated unprecedented numbers of photographs over a short period, with little public reflection on the politics and ethics of their practices and settings. Compared to the picture collections of public institutions such as the SLV with about 300,000 images, or Library of Congress in Washington with about 12 million (Library of Congress, 2010), the numbers of images are on an entirely different scale. Flickr held over 6 billion images in 2011, while estimates for Facebook ranged from 90 to 140 billion, growing at between 1 to 2 billion a week (Flickr, 2011; Good, 2011; Mitchell, 2011). This is not to make judgments about the value or variety of the respective collections, but to recognize that nothing like these user-generated digital collections has ever existed. These archives belong to the widely touted era of ‘big data’ (Economist, 2010) and are the flipside of the operational archives of public institutions.

Content on these archives is not organized by a top-down curation process but is largely user-generated and, to some extent, self-organized through dynamic indexing practices such as tagging, formation of groups and so on. As Van Dijck (2011: 405) notes: ‘Flickr was … one of the first sites to implement tag clouds.’ However, while ‘folksonomy’ grants users a degree of flexibility in classifying material, it carries its own price. While site owners such as Flickr or Facebook do not claim ownership of images (as is sometimes reported), they do arrogate a variety of rights to themselves – including the right to use certain images in advertising. However, the key right they claim is the right to data-mine the images (including their metadata) and the user transactions that surround their posting and exchange. As Huang and Hsu (2006) note, Flickr collects five distinct types of data: people pictured in the photo, events tagged, time stamp, location and ownership of upload. This provides information not just about the photographs, but also about the networks of sociability in which they circulate.

It is this sort of individuated data that is becoming increasingly central to the political economy of what Scott Lash (2010) calls ‘intensive culture’, in which cultural and economic practices are increasingly centred around the intensive techno-creative labour of users. Governance of platforms like Flickr and Facebook occurs through the affordances of software, including the terms of service and end-user license agreements, but also through user-contributed processes of evaluation (commenting, reporting offensive material, using like and +1 buttons, etc.). It is also worth noting that Facebook still implements a high-level of manual control over its pseudo-public image space. Filtering or moderating of all images posted to the site is outsourced to low-paid offshore workers, most of them employed by the California-based global outsourcing firm oDesk (Chen, 2012; oDesk, 2012). The bluntness of the filters means that a general prohibition of nudity notoriously includes the routine removal of images of women breast-feeding.

As large-scale image sets become searchable and researchable, the process of constructing photographic meaning is beginning to change according to a range of different criteria determined by software applications. This has broader implications for knowledge traditions. In particular, the old division between surface and depth analysis – aggregating broad but shallow data gained from many examples versus rich data sourced from fewer – that animated historical distinctions between the statistical approaches of the social sciences and the hermeneutic approaches of the humanities, has begun to lose some of its purchase in a context where ‘sampling’ can give way to ‘whole population’ monitoring (Latour, 2007). In the context of photography, the broader transition taking place is arguably a shift from an older understanding of the image based on aesthetics and the politics of representation towards a new understanding of images as ‘data’ governed by the algorithmic politics of search.

One problem is that, like the much-touted ‘end of privacy’, the operationality of the archive is currently quite asymmetrical. Few would have dreamt of asking, say, Kodak into their houses, giving them the right to look though their photo albums and analyse them in any way they choose, including face recognition, and analysis of metadata such as camera type and geolocation. But that is what hundreds of millions of people are now doing with Facebook and Flickr. While anyone can search the public photographs on these sites, most of the data remains hidden behind corporate walls. ‘Whole of population’ analysis is only available to the archive owner. Unlike Facebook, Flickr provides some access to its APIs (Application Programming Interfaces). This has enabled some novel research projects such as ‘Mapping the world’s photos’, which employed a dataset of about 35 million images collected from Flickr to plot the ‘spatial distribution of where people take photos’ and ‘to define a relational structure between the photos that are taken at popular places’ (Crandall et al., 2009). But even where researchers have access, the utility of the data will vary greatly depending on the availability of number crunching tools and capabilities. In other words, it is not possession of proprietary data or a proprietary algorithm alone, but the conjunction of the two that is so powerful in the present. This is where companies such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook remain far ahead.

As I have argued in this article, the public institution has never been a problem-free image archive. Nevertheless, a process of political struggle undertaken by indigenous peoples drawing on discourses such as the ideal of the equality of all citizens has proved capable of forcing significant changes in the culture of public archives as they enter the digital milieu. As public institutions (and millions of citizens) begin to entrust their images to the operational archive of image-hosting services, the question remains: what discourse might achieve equivalent leverage in these new conditions? What will foster respect for the differential value of images beyond their role in generating data for user profiles?

In closing, I would like to recall a four-channel video installation, with salvage and knife tongue, produced by American-Indian arts collective Postcommodity for the 2012 Adelaide International, curated by Victoria Lynn. The work involved collaboration between Postcommodity and four on-camera participants (two Pitjantjatjara people, two American Indian people) who were filmed speaking a script composed of a dozen or so statements in English. What is distinctive about the work is the way it actively recomposes the voices of the participants by digitally analysing sonic information and comparing similarities and differences in pitch, rhythm and intonation. The effect is quite mesmerizing, teetering between the distinctiveness of individual voices with their unique geographical and cultural inflections and a software reconstructed voice that reveals structural similarities (and differences) between Australian Aboriginal and American Indian peoples for whom English was the shared language of colonization.

with salvage and knife tongue eschews not only the colonial clichés of forked-tongue liars, but also the documentary heritage that associates straight-to-camera speech with a politics of authenticity. Crucially for this space, the interdisciplinary team that make up Postcommodity write their own code. They recognize that getting a voice in the present of information overflow is not simply a matter of speaking out: it is also about the capacity to intervene in the socio-technical conditions of speech. This kind of intervention, that combines elements of collaborative practice and conceptual art with programming skills, measures the distance travelled from the place once allocated to indigenous peoples in the colonial archive. It also indicates that, while the ethics of the convivial photography practised by Ricky Maynard remains a vital touchstone in the politics of the digital image, there is a growing need to pay attention to the algorithmic politics of search, and the access and data protocols of the operational archive.