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Recent scholarship bringing together photography, visual culture and political theory is unsettling established approaches to understanding photography beyond art-historical frameworks. This article examines the implications and potentials for education practices of this emerging new paradigm by exploring how the civil potential of photography and creative practice might be activated in learning environments. The article reflects on the collective learning arising from a series of educational experiments developed by the Doing Visual Politics network which have sought to connect cultures of socially motivated creative practice in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia; Kathmandu, Nepal and Dhaka, Bangladesh by interrogating and expanding disciplinary understandings at the intersection of photography, visual activism, social practice and public pedagogy. These learning spaces – where the expression of concern for shared world/s is prioritized – have provided useful insights into approaches capable of exceeding the limits of the conventional politics of representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual language and culture are co-constitutive and constantly evolving. This transformation is more pronounced in the contemporary visual literacy landscape especially with widely used social media and more democratic technologies, such as smartphone cameras, which are used for myriad purposes and in diverse ways. These uses and purposes vary by culture and demographics but little is understood about how smartphone cameras shape contemporary Western ways of seeing: visual culture and literacy. Specifically, this study seeks to explore and identify how people living in Australia use their smartphone cameras to document their everyday lives. It also explores how these devices influence the participants' visual languages and literacies. To analyse these changes, this study adopts a two-method approach. First, 30 participants were recruited from three different age groups. These participants donated a consistent two weeks of the images on their camera rolls for analysis. These images were then subjected to an 11-variable analysis. Second, 23 participants followed through with an interview to contextualise their photographic behaviour and identify the aspects they perceive shape their ways of seeing. These two methods allow an understanding of who or what is photographed as well as how and why these participants made images in certain ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discussions of Australian art in the run-up to Federation have long focused on the iconic works of Melbourne's leading impressionist painters. However, it was the wood-engraved pictures of settler-colonial Australia's illustrated press, especially in Sydney, that dominated its visual culture in the second half of the 19th century. Between 1885 and 1900, the influence of Sydney's artist-illustrators reached new heights, thanks to the appearance of the Picturesque Atlas of Australasia. This extravagantly illustrated publication was widely hailed as marking "the birth of art beneath the Southern Cross". The artists of the Atlas succeeded not only in consolidating a settler-colonial iconography of Australia's history, achievements and prospects but also in disseminating it through their later work for the Sydney Mail, the London Graphic and the Bulletin. Led by Julian Ashton, they transformed Sydney into the epicentre of Australian settler art, drawing Tom Roberts and Arthur Streeton into their orbit by the 1890s. Following the illustrated press's abandonment of wood engraving, these artists continued to influence Australia's visual culture via other media up to and including the First World War. Revisiting Sydney's golden age of illustration offers a new window onto the art most Australians saw. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men's magazines have formed a significant part of Australian illustrated magazine publishing since 1936. In this article, I broadly survey the field up until 1971, concentrating particularly on bikini and nude photography, which defined the category. I then focus on the period of the 1960s, when men's magazines were most relevant to Australia's rapidly changing sexual politics and its censorship debates. I reveal that, although they were by their nature visually repetitious, far from being a marginal or trivial category, they were deeply implicated in the development of broader Australian visual culture and its sexual politics, and fundamental to wider innovations in publishing, as well as the careers of several important Australian photographers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 1900, a new type of charity event – the advertising poster ball – was introduced to Australia. The event brought together a range of pre-existing cultural forms to promote mass market brands, facilitated by a new, visual advertising culture. Over the next forty years, the poster ball was adopted by community groups, becoming a regular feature on the social and fundraising calendar. By harnessing people's innate longing for creative expression and shared social activity to the promotion of commercial brands, the poster ball linked these brands to pleasurable social events, helping embed them in Australian cultural memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been argued that laundry blue (whitener) was introduced into western Arnhem Land in the second half of the 1920s by missionaries, where it was used by Aboriginal people in rock art and on a variety of objects. Recent examination of museum collections acquired from the Northern Territory Native Industrial Mission at Kapalga in today's Kakadu National Park, shows that the introduction of laundry blue into local Aboriginal artistic practices was earlier, around 1900. We discuss two examples of objects painted with laundry blue, a fibre basket and a bark belt, as well as broader ethnographic evidence relating to the significance of the color blue. We argue that the use of laundry blue is not only the result of access to an exotic new color but also has links to existing cultural beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I examine how the competing positions and claims of Australian citizens, First Nations people and refugees are negotiated visually in the global public sphere. Australian perspectives on struggles over citizenship and semi-porous borders must be understood within a history of nation-building, regional relations and the ideology of Whiteness. How does visual culture constitute categories of inclusion and exclusion? Visual strategies that define and contest the place of Indigenous Australians, as well as refugees seeking to come to Australia have been criticised for depicting their subjects as abject victims who lack agency or history, or simply rendering them invisible. Some have been critical of the visual discourse of spectacular violence that has been created and promoted by the Australian government in its pursuit of policies of ‘deterrence’. Seeking to challenge this regime of erasure and de-humanisation, activists have adopted a range of innovative visual tactics, including self-representation by refugees themselves. Tactics of humanisation, such as depicting the love of a mother for her child, draw figures such as asylum seekers into the civil sphere. The extraordinary story of Iranian-Kurdish refugee and journalist Behrouz Boochani traces the emergence of a new humanitarian icon, rising from the invisibility shield of Australia’s official border protection regime. I examine the extent to which these strategies shape debates around migration and refugees, and mediate between the historically powerful principles of Australian exclusion and the legitimate claims of refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The category of the 'everyday' has been relatively un-theorised in studies of digital food culture. Drawing on theories that the everyday is not just a backdrop but through which race, class and gender are constituted, and the cultural production of whiteness, I analyse digital photographs from the Welcome Dinner Project's webpages and social media. The Welcome Dinner Project is an Australian food hospitality activism charity, which organises and facilitates one-off dinners to bring 'newly arrived' and 'established Australians' together over potluck hospitality to address isolation and racism. My overall argument is that Welcome Dinner Project representations and media representations of Welcome Dinner Project are underscored by conflicting representations of race, diversity and privilege. Despite the good intentions of the Welcome Dinner Project, the formal images it disseminates work to service the status quo by enacting and reinforcing dominant notions of middle-class whiteness in Australia, moderating the transgressive potential of its activism. However, these processes are subverted by less formal and unruly images depicting people outside, in mess, in non-hierarchical groups and migrant hosting. Such imagery can be understood as a form of visual activism which challenges the iconographies of whiteness in digital food culture and normative ideals of race-neutral domesticity and everydayness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media emerged with a broad understanding that egalitarian practices would become the standard approach to publishing and distributing content. In recent times we have seen this flat hierarchical approach fade as commercial stakeholders, platform providers and content publishers continue to design and practice exclusionary processes to ensure their work is visible. This current practice limits the capacity for all voices to be heard, prompting the question how can digital activism remain visible in a media-saturated social media environment? This paper draws on a content analysis of the most popular YouTube users in Australia to illustrate the absence of digital activism within its visual culture. It maps the process of fragmented platformization, called here micro-platformization, to highlight the content production and publishing strategies digital activists should adopt. While successful commercial YouTube practitioners adhere closely to the principles of social media logics (Van Dijck, J., & Poell, T. (2014). Understanding Social Media Logic. Media and Communication, 1(1), 2–14), this paper argues that stakeholders engaging in the practice of digital activism need to adopt similar strategies to their commercial counterparts. By including strategies that reflect the successful practices of social media logics, digital activism can not only become visible across social media spaces, but also engage public discourse on civic matters and public affairs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on borders as both physical and metaphysical boundaries—ones that are manifest in systems of meaning, punishment and surveillance. These systems operate on the human body as discipline and punishment in multiple ways. Drawing on a critical framework of the racialized carceral state, this article explores artistic and literary interventions by refugees against the architecture of externalized borders imposed by the Australian state. The works of the Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani and his collaborators are explored as a case study. Boochani is subject to Australia's offshore detention regime, detained on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea. This article asks what new concepts are needed to disrupt the hierarchy of humans that is a by-product of the national border and its systems of control, criminalization and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The archives of colonial Southeast Asia and northern Australia contain hundreds of photographs of masterly white colonizers and their seemingly devoted Asian ‘houseboys’. This article analyses this rich photographic archive, drawing on examples from the Netherlands Indies, Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, and the Northern Territory of Australia. It explores how photographs of ‘houseboys’ worked as a ‘visual culture’ of empire that was intended to illustrate and immortalize white colonial power, but that also expressed anxieties about colonial projects. As well as a tool for understanding the assertions and insecurities of white colonizers, the article argues that photographs of servants can be used to illuminate the working lives of these Chinese, Malay, Javanese, and Filipino men. Drawing on a remarkable studio portrait that was commissioned by three Filipino servants and an oral history account from a Chinese servant, I conclude that both masters and servants used the photographic medium to assert their power in the home and the colony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australian scholars are now familiar with the tropes of the Anzac legend. This narrative describes the realisation of an Australian masculine identity, whose characteristics were forged on the Australian frontier and validated through the ordeal of battle. Though many writers contributed to this narrative, C.E.W. Bean, the official historian of the Australian Imperial Force during the First World War, is most closely associated with the popularisation of this myth, which fused frontier and martial masculinity into a national archetype. This article will examine the role of the slouch hat as a material and visual device that helped communicate the Anzac legend. While most of the scholarship that examines the construction of this narrative focuses on its articulation in prose, this narrative was also popularised through other media. Artists drew symbols of the frontier into their paintings while museum directors arranged their artefacts to support this narrative. This article will argue that the slouch hat provided an essential visual device to connect the narratives of frontier and martial masculinity through the image of the Australian soldier. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Online promotional videos on Australian university websites are a form of institutional branding and marketing that construct university experience in a variety of ways. Here we consider how these multimedia texts represent student lifestyles, identities and aspirations in terms of the ‘good life’. We consider how the ‘promise of happiness’ is deployed to appeal to perceived consumer desires within the local student market, as well as within the highly competitive global knowledge economy. These texts position university students as youthful, attractive, active and fun, and depict student life as being about leisure and pleasure. Such representations promote cultural and social entitlement to the ‘good life’ as if synonymous with choice, participation and success in higher education. Learning and scholarship are depicted as secondary activities. We also contend that claims to cosmopolitanism and consumerism are framed by racialised entitlements where Whiteness remains both a commodity and norm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As a primary site for the transmission and reception of popular visual culture, the cinema theatre occupied a very particular position for much of the twentieth century. Today these buildings maintain a strong hold on the public imagination, existing as models of both collective spectatorship and individual subjectivity that have been largely supplanted by a range of technological and social forces. This article investigates the resonances of these lost sites of spectatorship through a body of films held by the National Film and Sound Archive that document the destruction of Sydney's cinemas from the 1960s to the 1980s. Drawing on my own recent work with this footage, the article explores the archival function of the moving image. Central to this discussion is the recognition that these filmic documents function not only as records of physical and architectural loss but also point towards a more profound sense of loss tied to the passage of a phase of spectacular consumption and individual subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Salvation Army lectureSoldiers of the Cross(1900) is famous in Australia for incorporating some of the earliest fiction film shot in Australia into an integrated ‘feature-length’ production. However, it was predominantly a life-model lantern-slide lecture; and a close analysis of the slides in sequence, correlated with contemporaneous reports, indicates that it made significant innovations on nineteenth-century modes of narrative, and deployed different modalities of time and realism into a highly affective whole.Soldiers of the Crosswas therefore an even more important event in Australia’s media history than has been perceived hitherto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter considers the value of visual analyses for studying social movements through a study of pro-life uses of images of the fetus in the Australian abortion debate. In doing so, it points to important connections between the study of emotions in politics and visual approaches to social movement studies. It also contributes new primary material on the politics of reproduction through its study of the Australian pro-life movement, on which little has been written. Through discursive analysis of visual materials and practices embedded in three case studies, I demonstrate the range of strategies being used; their selection was informed by a wider survey of available records of pro-life uses of images of the fetus over the past four decades. Emotion is a powerful element of politics, and images of the fetus challenge the emotions, and hence the humanity, of the viewer. I identify three major themes represented in pro-life images of the fetus: the wonder of life; the human form and human frailty of the fetus; and the barbarity of modern society. The meanings of these images are built on our parallel understandings of both sight and emotion as immediate and unmediated. Moreover, the ambiguities and dualities of images of the fetus make their themes more, rather than less, persuasive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1927, an inquiry into what has come to be known as the Forrest River massacre sent shockwaves across Australia and overseas, playing an important part in the shift toward better treatment of Aboriginal people. The evidence tendered to the inquiry was narrowly forensic, focused upon dates, places and human remains, alongside three photographs of the outback crime scenes: how were these grainy, scratched, inscrutable images seen at the time? How should we look at them now? The horrified public preferred to look at more eloquent, familiar images of Indigenous suffering. In this paper I review these parallel, sometimes intersecting, ways of seeing Aboriginal people, and consider the role photography has played in arguing for Indigenous rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional use of the colonial visual archive as evidence and historical illustration is undergoing a significant shift, giving way to creative interventions by Indigenous Australians. The ferment surrounding the 'history wars' has led artists and scholars to rethink the colonial archive as a contested site productive of dynamic and archaic revisions. Departing from the memory ruts that have become entrenched in the national imaginary, these disruptions, reappraisals and refigurings importantly foreground Indigenous Australia's relationship with the colonial archive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]