Patrick Waterhouse: Restricted Images – Made With the Warlpiri of Central Australia, SPBH Editions, London 2018

During the late nineteenth century, in the course of explorations to unknown territory, with the aim of mapping the last “blank” spots on the globe, the so-called “anthropological image” emerged. In the last decade, this white gaze onto the unknown has been under wide scrutiny, particularly within debates of postcolonialism or decolonization: image production always stands in relation to a narrative and a mechanism which constructs this narrative, lending credibility and herewith authorizing the image.

In his most recent project, Patrick Waterhouse —who together with Mikhael Subotzky was awarded the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2015 for the publication Ponte City— reconsiders the colonial space of Australian history and its depiction in European archival material and maps by particularly examining the anthropological image within its regimes. In 2011, Patrick Waterhouse set out to investigate Australia’s colonial history— a history not taught in school, as the 1981-born Briton notes.¹ Over the years he has built an archive of various historical documents, such as maps, photographs, old school publications, or historic lithographic books, which he has reexamined together with Aborigines in schools and different workshops in art community centers. With artists from the Aborigine-owned Warlukurlangu Art Centre in the communities of Yuendumu and Nyirripi (Northern Territories), he collaborated on these subjects over a period of four years, taking photographs which he then returned to the community to be discussed and reworked. The book Restricted Images: Made with the Warlpiri of Central Australia compiles these works by focusing on early anthropological publications and their visual regimes.

The opening page of the publication is a warning that addresses native communities: “Members of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities are respectfully advised that a number of people mentioned in the text and depicted in the images of this publication have died.” This refers to their custom and belief (which also holds true for a good many tribes) of destroying the belongings of the deceased since nothing is allowed to further exist after their death, relating also to the fact that traditional Aborigines refused to be photographed. This page follows a listing of the thirty-nine names of Warlpiri collaborators and a short introductory text, referring to the early publication The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) by Baldwin Spencer and Francis J. Gillen. The two authors—Spencer, a biologist, anthropologist, and photographer, and Gillen, a telegraph-station master, anthropologist, and ethnologist—give an account of their three-month-long Horn Expedition, from May to August 1894, which garnered broad academic interest. The intention was to “set forth an account of the customs and social organisation of certain of the tribes inhabiting Central Australia.”² The text of this book is in Australia’s public domain and circulates online, only showing in the first chapter the accompanying illustrations from the printed version: disclosed are roughly one hundred photographs of indigenous people carrying out their everyday duties, as well as portraits, sacred sites, artifacts, or burial grounds.

With reference to this historical undertaking (working on the same sites and with the same community), Patrick Waterhouse started a process of questioning his practice as a photographer and the ambivalent meanings generated by anthropological photography taking a collaborative approach: the formal aspect of his sequence of 131 black-and-white photographs, most carefully painted over, reveals the struggle with the colonial gaze that measured, classified, and generated the colonized subject. The photographic portraits are taken straight from the front or in profile, with the sitters not depicted as individuals but as subjects that are the focus of a dominant gaze. Patrick Waterhouse reenacted this controversial photographic practice and additionally arranged the portraits in a grid—once again referencing historical comparative ethnological imageries.

Yet the artist returned the photographs to the indigenous people from the Warlukurlangu Art Centre, who reworked them with their traditional dot paintings, that is, by overlaying each portrait with dotted lines but leaving out the background that would reference the specific situation. The other portraits are utterly black, with silhouettes marking the different hairstyles and physiognomies. Scenes from the everyday as well as aerial views of the landscape and of cultic sides are framed by titles that seem to have been taken out of a conversation: “Let’s Go to Mining,” “Enough Picture,” “It’s a Good Feed and It’s Medicine,” “We Used to Go as Kids” . . . These phrases end with “Restricted with” and the name of the person who overpainted the image, so the faceless gets personalized through the censor. The act of handing back the imagery enables a transformative moment and symbolically returns the agency involving the representation of the Warlpiri back to their community. The photographed individuals and the artist (bringing in the point of view of an ethnologist) together explore the ambivalent meaning of ethnological photography and investigate questions of representation in historical photography and its colonial past— which cannot be laid aside or overcome.