Submission to “Body and Technology: Instruments of
Somaesthetics” conference
January 24-26, 2013, The Center for Body, Mind and Culture,
Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida
Name of author
Dr. Rachel Alpha Johnston Hurst
Title of paper
“North American Colonial Photography and the Disavowal of
Interstitial Space”
Institutional affiliation
Women’s and Gender Studies Programme, St. Francis Xavier University
Contact information
P. O. Box 5000
Antigonish, NS
B2G 2W5
rahurst@stfx.ca
(902) 867-4927
Audio-visual needs
I will need a projector for my presentation.
I can bring a laptop.
Abstract
Since its invention in the mid-19th century, photography has been
deployed as documentation for the surface transformations of bodies,
and the photograph has been offered up as evidence that an
intervention into identity has occurred. However, the use of
photography as an intervening technology is particularly targeted at
bodies that are gendered and racialized as non-white and non-male,
and rests on the fantasy that total transformation has occurred
because of the visual evidence that the photograph provides. Through
archival research and an approach that decolonizes and unsettles the
photographs, this paper investigates how photography was used to
‘civilize’ and assimilate Indigenous bodies in North America, and
offers a way of understanding the connections between photographic
practices in Edward S. Curtis’ 20 volume photographic collection The
North American Indian, Richard Henry Pratt’s ‘before and after’
photographs of Indigenous children attending the Carlisle Indian
Industrial School, and commercial photographers of northwestern North
America like Richard and Hannah Maynard and Frederick Dally. This
paper argues that what links the practices of late 19th and early 20th
century photography of Indigenous peoples together is that they
expose the logic of photography to be one of ‘before and after,’
intentionally erasing and disavowing interstitial spaces of violence
and dominance.
This paper is a part of a larger project on photography as a
technology used to categorize of colonized lands, resources, and
people within government documentation, commercial photography, and
the albums of settlers. This project aims to destabilize the
objectivity of photographic documentation to show how this archive is
used to structure a fantasized ‘before’ and ‘after’ of settler
contact that erases the violence of Indigenous-settler relations to
depict North American colonization as a benevolent intervention.