Picturing Country: Contemporary Photomedia Storytelling and The Aboriginal Cultural Landscape

Since the invention of the medium, place narratives have profoundly shaped the language of photography within the field of Australian visual cultures. Contemporary Aboriginal photomedia storytelling elaborates narratives from a dwelling perspective for which individual subjects are intrinsically enmeshed in the living histories of cultural landscapes. Through its distinct forms of visibility, the Indigenous Australian visual realm is revelatory of the extended network of subjectivities and relational commitments embodied within the culturally dense notion of country. Drawing from stories told by contemporary Aboriginal artists James Tylor and Hayley Millar-Baker, this article will argue that photomedia storytelling addressing landscape as terrain of contestation of colonial narratives enacts a sense of emplacement through the processing of a traumatic past. Engaging with an emotional memory reactivated through the recursiveness of a non-linear time, these visual yarns intervene into the public discourse around colonialism and unsettle dominant narratives of absence and invisibility, ultimately restoring connections and asserting cultural continuity and sovereignty.