Three weeks with strangers: Photography and the production of social identity during the 1935 Board of Anthropological Research expedition to the Warburton Range, Western Australia

Abstract

Using a range of archival and published sources including field notes, photographs and drawings, this paper investigates the social relationships formed between Ngaanyatjarra families and a small group of scientists in the presence of cameras during a 3-week ethnographic research expedition to the Warburton Range in 1935. The impression left by the ethno-historical record is that, despite disparate norms around looking behaviours, a degree of familiarity was quickly established that enabled intimate acts of filming and photography. And yet the inter-subjectivity that facilitated such photography was deliberately obscured when the images produced were subsequently disseminated to outside audiences, in effect reinstating social distance and turning Aboriginal familiars back into strangers. Recent reconsiderations of the figure of 'the stranger' (Simmel 1999; Marotta 2012) and an extensive literature on the relationship between anthropological knowledge and photography (Edwards 1992, 2001) help to unpack what this sociality reveals about belonging, identity and the representative reach of photographic mediums. A series of crayon drawings by the expedition's young Aboriginal guide points to the limits of the social categories assumed for Ngaanyatjarra people by these scientists. In their place is found complex contemporary Aboriginal identities that were simultaneously modern and traditional, embedded in evolving intergenerational social frameworks that have endured until today.