​Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (New)

This tintype CIPX series celebrates Indigenous excellence in the Australian arts industry by photographing leading Indigenous curators, arts workers and artists who are working in national art museums in 2021. The Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) is an international Indigenous portraiture photographic project. The CIPX project encourages Indigenous photographers from around the world to photograph members of their local Indigenous communities using the 19th century tintype process. My contribution to the CIPX project attempts to re-contextualise the early photo-documentation of Aboriginal people by European anthropologists in the 19th and early 20th century in Australia. The CIPX portraits differ from the early photographic portraits of Aboriginal people taken by European anthropologists in ways that give agency and respect to the contemporary people. European Anthropologists would generally control the visual representation of the Aboriginal sitter and the original photograph would be kept by the photographer after it was taken. The CIPX project allows the person sitting for the photograph to have the control of how they would like to be represented in the photograph and the original tintype photographs from the CIPX project is given to the sitters to keep. The CIPX project was first created by artist Will Wilson of Dine (Navajo) heritage, who is based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA.
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