Abstract:
This thesis offers a critical exploration of landscape photography as a settler colonial technology. Its starting point is that photography is instrumental to the ongoing settler process of re-inscribing an existing indigenous place in order to establish a so-called ‘new’ country. Because the beginning of active European settlement in this country aligns with the development of the photographic practice of ‘writing with light’ in E urope, Aotearoa/New Zealand offers a particularly strong example of a place framed by a “photo-scopic episteme” (Batchen, 29). The thesis proposes that formulating a photography of place is necessary to understand the ground-work performed by image-making practices in a settler colonial context, and to account for how living bodies of Indigenous knowledge are affected by technologies and ideologies of settlement. It also calls for light, as the cosmogenic grounds of both photography and place, to be understood as “culturally and historically specific” (Miles, 227). What responsibilities does a photographer have to the grounds on which they stand? How does photography act as a form of historiography, and what does it reveal about the relationships between place and time? In what ways do photographs taken in a settler colonial place interrupt western taxonomies of the photographic image? And how might a photography of place draw on and contribute to understandings of legal protections accorded to mātauranga Māori in the context of Te Ao Māori? The thesis is organised into seven sections which examine processes common to photography and settlement. It extends the connections between settler colonialism, photography and place in Aotearoa/New Zealand that have been mapped by Barry Barclay, Natalie Robertson and S tephen Turner. Through the lens of four recent projects that use photography as historiography in Aotearoa/New Zealand, it explores the historical and cosmogenic grounds of photography and it traverses strata concealed by the photographic surface to expose other understandings of place. Mobilising diagrams and photographs, the thesis seeks to break the line of chronological settler history, modelling how alternate knowledges might manifest through chronoscopic approaches to space and time.