Embodied encounters: The photographic seeds of Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr's ten canoes

Photographic technologies are usually viewed in postcolonial discussions as being exploitative of indigenous peoples and themes. In the context of anthropological photography, this perspective reaches its high point in being viewed as the West's privileging of vision as the basis for all knowledge of the Other. Christopher Pinney says the familiar, panoptic view of the twinned history of anthropology and photography accounts for only one of its two alternative histories. 1 Its other histo1y is marked by "moments of unease," one that is fractured by the competing interpretive claims of realism on the one hand and expressionism on the other (AP, 72).