Here’s a riddle: What’s the dominant image of the 2018 election campaign? There isn’t one. But there are many.
This 1904 photograph showing the massacre of villagers by Dutch KNIL forces in the Indonesian village of Koetö Réh was used by the Dutch to argue for the paternalistic colonial state as protector. We now see it as evidence of imperial atrocity.
Collection Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.
From depictions of slavery to colonial massacres to contemporary portraits of refugees, photography is a powerful tool in evoking ideas of shared humanity.
Photos of beaming young asylum-seekers with their families aboard HMAS Adelaide in October 2001 told a completely different story to the government’s spurious ‘children overboard’ claims.
Courtesy Project SafeCom, Jack H Smit.
Images move us to act – as last week’s episode of Four Corners has shown. Our government has gone to great lengths to suppress photos that humanise asylum seekers – but when they seep out, empathy is aroused.
Fairfax staff are on strike today in protest against cuts to the picture departments at the company’s mastheads.
AAP Image/Julian Smith
In the documentary Gallipoli from Above, an Australian production that recently aired on ABC TV, Hugh Dolan, author of 36 Days: The Untold Story Behind the Gallipoli Landings argues that at 4am on April…