Picturing the old people

In 2004 Genevieve Grieves worked with the historical photographic collection at the State Library of Victoria to repatriate images. The collection consists predominately of images of Victorian Aboriginal people taken by non-Aboriginal, male photographers. Grieves’ role was to relocate, both physically and emotionally, the images from the ethnographic archive into family photo albums. This process saw Grieves researching both the subjects within the images and the studios they were taken in. She travelled throughout Victoria to consult with communities and to locate descendants.
Grieves questioned the 19th-century images by photographers including John William Lindt and Charles Kerry, who, in their Melbourne and Sydney studios, staged and mass-produced representations of Aboriginal people. The images were often both physically and metaphorically constructed: painted backdrops, costumes and stage props were used to represent Aboriginal people. These images were, Grieves has said, ‘used as sort of raw data. They were seen as a source of anthropological material, when they’re so obviously constructed’.
Decoding these contrived images was the inspiration for ‘Picturing the Old People’ 2005, a five-channel video work representing the themes – ‘desire’, ‘warriors’, ‘mourning’, ‘family’ and ‘lost children’ – that Grieves identified. Each of the five moving images re-enacts a scenario from the 19th-century photographic studio. In all but one we see the photographer directing the scene. The scenario ‘warriors’ shows two Aboriginal men brought into the studio, stripped of their European clothes, dressed in kangaroo skins and armed with boomerangs and shields, all provided by the photographer, who, engrossed in his own actions, demonstrates how to pose and act.