623312

research-article2016
MCU0010.1177/1359183515623312Journal of Material CultureDeger

Journal of

MATERIAL
Article CULTURE
Journal of Material Culture
2016, Vol. 21(1) 111­–132
Thick photography © The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1359183515623312
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Jennifer Deger
The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, Queensland, Australia

Abstract
Across remote Aboriginal Australia, phone and tablet photographic technologies are giving rise
to vibrant new forms of visual culture. Greenscreen software, montage and .gif effects enable
the creation of layered images that literally pulse with meaning and affect. Akin to bark painting
– yet deliberately different – such images reveal the spectral depth of Yolngu worlds. At a time
when families across Arnhem Land face relentless loss and social stress, the making, sharing and
viewing of elaborated family photographs reaffirm, reconstitute, and thicken a world of vitality,
resonance and ancestral significance. Through deliberately posed and often highly postproduced
photography Yolngu can creatively participate in a profoundly synaesthetic and sentient world, a
world enlivened by uncanny encounter, a world that requires the ongoing affirmation and renewal
of relationships through imagistic practice. This is a world of sensuous force and inside meanings,
a world that far exceeds the registers of what the eye can see, the camera can capture, or, indeed,
what the anthropologist will ever know.

Keywords
Aboriginal visual culture, anthropology of photography, digital aesthetics, digital materiality,
indigenous media, light as material culture, photographic affect

As human lives become ever more mediated by coloured pixels and glowing screens, the
sense of sight itself has become flattened. In the thrall of shiny surfaces and sheer appear-
ance, seduced by seemingly limitless, quick-shifting fields of visibility, we no longer
recognize, or value, the invisible and interior forces that once compelled our visual art.
And so, this screen-life – for all its visual stimulation – not only diminishes perception,
but diminishes our worlds, our relationships, and our sense of what matters. We become
the society of the selfie.
Or so one story goes.

Corresponding author:
Jennifer Deger, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University, PO Box 6811, Cairns, Queensland 4870, Australia.
Email: jennifer.deger@jcu.edu.au
112 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

Figure 1. Ganambarr Family, 2014. Artist: Rayleen Warrinydhun Garmu.

Pictured: Susan Watanyga Ganambarr, Nancy Yangulukbuy Ganambarr, Johnny Galmata Ganambarr, Jef-
fery Bortj Ganambarr, Jimmy Djawandjawan Ganambarr, Djirrmurrmurr Ganambarr, Dorothy Gudaltji
Muyarryun (decd.), Wilson Guluwu Ganambarr.The rainbow colours we call djari represent that old
woman’s mother. None of her sons would exist if not for their mother’s mother. That rainbow coloured
background holds them all together then. The inter-linking hearts show they’re missing her, because she’s
gone. (Curators’ notes)

This essay offers an alternative account of the sensuous dynamics that digital media can
excite – and the kinds of photographic impulses they stir in response. Using photographs
created by mobile phones in Aboriginal communities in northern Australia as exemplars of
what I call ‘thick photography’, I show how screen-based photo applications are being used
to assemble family photographs into something more – something wider, something deeper,
I hear my Yolngu colleagues say – than the original, unadorned images. The concentrated
spectral labour, I will argue, mobilizes affect, image and meaning to significant effect. The
resulting photographs not only evidence emergent forms of material culture, but they
become the very stuff with which stressed, and sometimes extremely fragile, worlds are
bound together (see Figure 1).
If you are not already doing so, I urge you to read this essay in electronic form. For
without the colour and the glow, a great deal is lost.
Deger 113

Photography and spectral substantiation

For many years now, I have been working with image technologies in Aboriginal com-
munities. Collaborating with Yolngu friends on film and exhibition projects has meant
working with the irregular rhythms of lives shaped by stress of many kinds. Poverty,
welfare dependency, ill health, premature deaths, constantly shifting assimilationist poli-
cies and other forms of bureaucratically-driven disempowerment and loss – all this strips
meaning and purpose from daily life. As effects accumulate, the rhythms of life become
erratic. Sorrow and frustration take an enormous toll. And yet – and this is harder to talk
about without sounding naïve, especially in the face of public discourses that consistently
figure remote Aboriginal communities in terms of a back-sliding metrics of disadvantage
– there is also a robustness to life in Arnhem Land that I find extremely compelling.
People shape their days with a certain resilient vitality that is generous, funny and often
wickedly clever.
The phone-made photographs I share in this essay – with the permission of key family
members – make aspects of this visible like never before. In the process they disrupt my
at times overwrought tendency to figure their days as either sorrowful or vital, frustrated
or happy, impoverished or funny. What I value most about these photographs is the ways
that they can allow strangers to apprehend something about Yolngu life as it is made, and
remade, framed as neither traditional culture, nor assimilation. In the process, a quiet
politics of affirmation is played out at the level of the sensorium.
Living across a remote region in northern Australia in communities that emerged from
missions established in the 1930s and 40s, Yolngu have come to hold a powerful place in
the Australian imagining of Aboriginal culture, especially because of ways their rich ritual
traditions have given rise to new distinctly ‘Yolnguized’ art forms from bark painting and
dance, to the internationally successful musical acts Yothu Yindi and Geoffery Gurrumul.
There have been Yolngu national political figures and educators who have also helped
raise the profile of a people, who come across as gracious, thoughtful and seemingly ever-
optimistic in the ways they invite others to participate in everyday kinship and sacred ritu-
als. Yolngu often describe the sharp intergenerational change they are experiencing in
terms of ‘losing culture’. However, when you pay attention to the particular ways that
they speak, there are clues to understanding what is at stake at alternative registers to that
marked in developmental or bureaucratic discourses. In these discussions, the powerful
and constitutive role of the senses often comes into sharp focus. For instance, Bangana
Wunungmurra, the first Yolngu man I collaborated with, characterised the threat of for-
eign media in terms of a cumulative assault on the sensorium. As he described it, outside
music and films threaten to make Yolngu ‘deaf’ and ‘blind’ to their own songs and the
communicative call of their land (Deger, 2006). For this reason, he said it was crucial to
make videos and other media to stimulate ‘Yolngu ways of seeing’. Paul Gurrumuruwuy,
another Yolngu media maker says that this digital work matters ‘because our culture is
fading’. He values our shared video work as a new means of stimulating a sensorium that
extends beyond human bodies to include a sentient and feelingful landscape inhabited by
generations past (Deger, 2013; Gurrumuruwuy et al., 2011).
The photographs I will discuss in this essay are similarly concerned with the power of
perception, innovation, stimulation, and light as material culture. Apart from the next
114 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

two images below, all the photographs in the essay belong to a genre of Yolngu photog-
raphy that has emerged in the last few years since mobile phones with touch screens and
data plans enabled widespread access to photo-editing apps on sites such as Google Play
(although, because of cost and familiarity with certain models and costs, many people
living in Yolngu communities continue to use more basic model ‘flip phones’ and there-
fore use much more basic editing facilities built-into their phones). This move to app-
based photography takes advantage of a proliferation of framing and collaging techniques
made available via web-based applications such as Imikimi, Picasa, Blingee and Pixiz.
These sites provide free access to readymade frames, backgrounds, and overlay in cele-
bration of what they claim as ‘collaborative digital creativity’ (http://imikimi.com). With
apps downloadable to personal devices (mostly phones, but sometimes when people can
afford them, tablets), these sites enable photographers with no, little or prior access to
either cameras or the internet to cut, paste, filter, frame, recolour, decorate and add text
to family photographs, creating a distinctly Yolngu genre of family portraiture.
Although the resulting images are increasingly being posted on Facebook or other
social media sites, amongst the Yolngu with whom I work they circulate mostly device-
to-device via Bluetooth or as MSM in fairly closed family networks. Almost all the pho-
tographs I display here were collected and stored on an iPad by a woman in her 30s who
neither makes the photographs nor participates in organised forms of social media. And
so, for the purposes of this essay, I will stick to an analysis of the specific relations photo-
graphs materialise on the screens of the makers and their close family members and leave
a consideration of the further ‘outward’ trajectories of these photographs for another time.
As some scholars note, images made on digital cameras are not ‘in the strictest sense
photographs’ (Edwards, 2012: 224). But in order to take these images – and the people who
made them – seriously, it is necessary to finally abandon the lingering nostalgia for ana-
logue photography and its indexical, light-borne relation to an originary ‘real’. As compel-
ling as this formulation may be – perhaps especially for those of us who remember the
magical materialisations of the darkroom as images became fixed on light-exposed paper
soaked in chemical baths – digital photography brings new dimensions to photography’s
power to materialise, tether and bind by using screens as well as lenses. In the process, it
produces new chains of relationship made with light and new variations on what might
count as a self-evidentiary ‘real’. In short, these photographs enable us to begin to appreci-
ate the social efficacies of photography as a malleable and re-mixable media.
I use the term ‘thick photography’ in response to these new photographic forms, as
they are created, circulated and valued in Yolngu settlements in northeast Arnhem Land,
most particularly the community of Gapuwiyak. The expression represents an attempt to
bring together certain long-lingering ideas about the constitutive relationships between
images, affect and digital world making in Arnhem Land. With a nod to Clifford Geertz,
it signals a concern with questions of aesthetics and interpretation in relation to acts of
‘light writing’. At the same time, I want the expression to gesture beyond the ethnogra-
pher, to a social project driven by Yolngu: one concerned with a kind of photographic
tangibility different to that which we might hold in our hands, or hang on our walls. For
thick photography is an art concerned less with the indexical traces of a singular moment
from the past – what Barthes (1981) identified as that which has been – than with the
effects of creative remediation on the present moment. And so, as I indicated above, I am
Deger 115

interested in the ways this screen-based photography produces performative moments of

materialisation – and how that produces a particular kind of spectral substantiation.1

A materiality of luminous flux

As Elizabeth Edwards (2012) so aptly describes, there is a particular ‘laminated’ quality
to photographs: a layering of image, affect and physical presence that combines to make
them highly complex, and deeply social, objects. Arguably anthropology’s greatest con-
tributions to the study of photography have come about exactly because ethnographers
have been able to chart these intertwining aspects by pursuing photographs as objects,
rather than simply images (Bell, 2008; Edwards and Hart, 2004; Geismar, 2009; Pinney,
2004; Vokes, 2008; Wright, 2013). Recent ethnographies suggest that photography’s
shift to a digital register need not impede such an approach. In keeping with wider theo-
retical moves seeking to make tangible forms of media once considered the very mani-
festation of immateriality, ethnographers have variously found ways to position digital
images within social worlds as ‘something to grasp and hold onto – rather than an ethe-
real sequence of binary code’ (Were, 2013: 220).
The analysis below takes a different tack. I am interested less in claiming digital pho-
tographs as objects, than in examining mobile phone screens as sites for the materialisa-
tion of social relations – and approaching the screen itself as a new kind of materiality.
In this regard, I draw from new media scholar Giuliana Bruno’s (2014) exhilarating
analysis of the screens that increasingly cloak our homes, bodies and lived environments.
Rather than focusing on screen-based acts of figuration – the actual work that artists
make for screens – Bruno attends to the relations generated through and between screens:
material relations made tangible through a dynamics of luminous flux, sedimentation
and affective trace. Her writing provides an invaluable new dimension to my own think-
ing about screens in Arnhem Land (Deger, 2006), even though I find my material most
compelling when it insists on correspondences between the screen and other, more ‘tra-
ditional’ surfaces such as skin and bark.
Although she doesn’t directly identify it as such, Bruno’s analysis resonates with the
current theoretical trajectory collectively identified as new materialisms (Bennett, 2010;
Braidotti, 2010; Coole and Frost, 2010). Concerned with ‘the lively immanence of mat-
ter’ (Coole and Frost, 2010: 9), these scholars draw variously on thinkers such as
Deleuze and Bergson to champion a new vitalism. In this formulation, ‘materiality is
always something more than “mere” matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or
difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive and unpredictable’. As
will become evident, this orientation towards immanence, affect and vital matter has
come to energise how I understand the ways that Yolngu inhabit – and create – worlds
with something akin to what Simon O’Sullivan (2013: 17) calls ‘transhuman aesthet-
ics’. That said, I proceed down this path with caution, with an eye to the ways that
Yolngu privilege the roles and responsibilities of creative human subjects within these
worlds specifically marked by ancestral immanence; also seeking to pay attention to the
ways that they understand that not all matter is equally alive – or even alive at all. Hence
the explicit work of enlivening that underpins our various art projects (Deger, 2013) –
and, I would argue, these photographs as well.
116 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

And so this essay follows Bruno’s lead in examining digital screens as a new and
particular kind of surface (and images thus as surfaces also). This brings a focus on
mobile phone screens as sites of visual depth, layered meaning and interwoven affects.2
Here the materiality that matters – that amalgam of rare minerals, moulded plastics, data
bits and software codes that gives phone-photography its hand-held substantiality and
captivating glow – exceeds the stuff at hand. Instead, the screen itself is taken as an inter-
active surface of the social: a membrane of luminous connectivity that mediates between
inside and outside, revealing relations even as it transforms them.
In the phone-made photographs I examine, the screen provides not only a site for
creative assemblage, but it substantiates them with a certain luminous materiality. The
intensely haptic and interactive surfaces of mobile phone screens act as generative sites
through which photographic images take new shape, materialising (and dematerialising)
through the flux of the expanded, data-delivered worlds that these screens bring within
reach (cf. De Largy Healy, 2013).
The challenge in writing has been finding ways to describe the thickness of these
photographs on something resembling the terms in which it is activated and ‘seen’ by
Yolngu. In order to do this it has been necessary to write towards what Yolngu call the
‘inside’ of these images. In northeast Arnhem Land this term is used to refer to the
dimensions of stories and images that can’t be made public – the deeper meanings asso-
ciated with powerful, ancestrally significant events that belong in ceremony. As such it
indicates an epistemology of layers and depth. But as Morphy (1991) has described, this
is not a fixed system: over time, knowledge, images, stories move from the inside to the
outside and vice versa. Likewise, rituals gain their power through acts of revelation
infused with an aesthetics of emergence (Deger, 2012). And so the ethnography pro-
ceeds with slightly different aesthetic ambitions, and theoretical orientations, to the
interpretive hermeneutics of the ‘thick description’ that Clifford Geertz (1973) once
prescribed. Nonetheless, somewhere in the centre of how I am trying to think about the
effects of photographic materialisations lurks an elusive idea about a new kind of spec-
tral, even synaesthetic, social thickness that is being generated by the ways Yolngu use
digital media.
As I proceed, I take inspiration from an Aboriginal regard for the co-constitutive rela-
tionship between affect, image and stories. In doing so I attempt to allow these family
photographs – never intended for public display or exegesis – the private space they
require, while providing detail enough so that the depth of the kinship they promote
might begin to show itself to strangers. In this way I try to do justice to worlds that
depend on certain ways of seeing in order to thrive: worlds of sensuous force and inside
meanings, worlds that far exceed the registers of what the eye can see, the camera can
capture, or, indeed, what this anthropologist will ever know.

Xena, 2008
The first thick photograph I ever registered as such was taken on an early model Nokia mobile
phone. This was before people started playing around with the edit functions that came pre-
loaded on their cheap, pre-paid mobiles, years before anyone in Arnhem Land had touch
phones or accounts with web-based photo-browsers. The main thing then was simply that
Deger 117

Figure 2. Xena Wanambi, 2008.

Figure 3. Xena Wanambi, 2008.

mobile phones came with cameras. For the first time, my Aboriginal friends and colleagues
were able to take and share their own photographs without relying on someone like me to act
as family photographer.

Xena Garratjawuy Wanambi’s mother took the first photograph of her first child on a
mobile phone at Gove District Hospital on the morning after a long night’s labour.
She quickly took a second.
These would be the images (see Figures 2 and 3) sent as instant messages to the
child’s father waiting at home 200 clicks down a bauxite-red road, the image that Lay’pu
would also send her mother, Susan Marrawakamirr, who lives in the same house in an
adjoining room; the room that Susan calls the kitchen but I always think of as the lounge,
118 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

even though it’s a lounge-less lounge room, a room in fact devoid of all furniture save a
giant flat screen TV, a DVD player and a couple of thin foam mattresses. Susan shifted
here with two other grandchildren, when Lay’pu first moved in with Mikey, only a year
or so before the baby arrived.
When the baby arrived, Susan, as the mother’s mother, or mari, had a particular
responsibility for naming her. She found Xena on a list of names downloaded from the
internet, and chose it, in large part for its novelty value, so that, like her brother Antonio
and cousin Elveston, this little girl won’t have to change names when someone with
the same name dies and restrictions kick in. Although each child will also be given
several Yolngu names holding great meaning and ancestral significance, these exotic
non-Indigenous names help people to sustain a stable and individualised identity in the
ever-expanding databases within which their lives (and indeed ours) are monitored and
administered.
In taking these photographs, Lay’pu performed one of her first maternal acts, an act
far more considered than it first appears. Although ostensibly like a million other shots
taken in similar circumstances in hospitals around the world, these are in fact extremely
and specifically located images: the arrangement, the colours and the designs cohere in
ways specifically arranged for Xena, placing this little person, fresh from the womb, in a
constellation of meaning and relationship that makes this photo pulse with life.
Wrapped in red, the baby wears the colour of her mother’s clan, the colour of the
Dhalwangu people who dance and sing the red cloth flag at funerals and circumcisions.
Even in everyday circumstances, on a t-shirt or in the choice of the colour of a phone,
Dhalwangu use red things to mark their ancestral identity. It’s a colour of heat and power;
a colour associated with a specific place and a specific set of stories. On Xena, the red
shows her ritually significant position as a child of Dhalwangu woman, what Yolngu call
djungaya.
Then there’s the pattern of the stitching on the blanket and the jumpsuit itself. Like
other Yirritja moiety clans, Dhalwangu people make sacred knowledge and identity visu-
ally manifest in the shape of diamonds (in the Dhalwangu case, these are somewhat elon-
gated). Through Yolngu eyes, the v-shape of the neckline and even the triangular shape of
the blanket-stitching can also be seen to locate Xena as the child of a Yirritja woman.
But this is just one set of relationships evoked here. Xena’s connection to her grand-
mother is referenced more directly in the second photograph where the frame has shifted
to emphasize the fat white butterflies dancing around the baby’s head. Manifestations of
life as constant metamorphosis, these butterflies directly link Xena to her grandmother’s
Dhuwa moiety clan. And, indeed, her own Marrangu clan as she follows the line laid
down by her father, her father’s brothers and their fathers in turn.
And so this photograph places Xena specifically in relation to her father, mother and
her grandmother, the most ritually significant ritual relationships she will grow up to have,
apart from with her own clan relatives. Strikingly, in the arrangement of the image there
is no direct reference to Xena’s own identity as a Marrangu clansperson. Yet Yolngu eyes
will see Xena’s deep connection to the sacred knowledge and designs of her clan materi-
ally manifest by the fact of the photo itself, they’ll see beneath the press-stud jumpsuit to
the ancestral force and authority that lies immanent in the substance and solidity of Xena’s
tiny bones.
Deger 119

Figure 4. Madadbuma the Datiwuy Shark, 2013. Artist: unidentified. Pictured: Zachariah
Djawalawuy Ganambarr and Madadbuma Ganambarr.
These two Datiwuy brothers call themselves shark boys. That’s their identity and song. They know how
to dance this and can be fierce and angry like the shark when he’s speared, or when he smells blood and
starts turning and thrashing in the water. There’s a special name for that gleaming, bubbling water the shark
makes when it rises up. We call it djarraran bunmirr.At the moment these boys each live with a different
grandmother in different communities. But here they are together again. (Curators’ notes)

In the careful framing, snapping and sending of this image (not to mention the internet
shopping done weeks before), Lay’pu not only introduces her daughter to her father and
grandmother in Gapuwiyak, but she places her child in a dynamically patterned mesh of
relationships and meaning: a world of generative potentiality, ancestral precedence and
inherent interconnections; a world that invites, and even requires, creative participation
in order that these connections be re-affirmed and renewed, generation to generation.

Madadbuma the Datiwuy Shark, 2013

Four years and three phones after Xena’s birth, I curated an exhibition of phone-made
media with nine Yolngu colleagues.3 Technology had moved quickly, and with it, Yolngu
photography.
These notes written for the exhibition position the photograph in a representational
framework of clan-based identity. But to leave an analysis at this level would be to
miss what is happening precisely in terms of surfaces. As the shark leaps through the
water, he breaks the surface of things, enacting an aesthetics of emergence that gives
depth and vitality to the photograph (see Figure 4). It is these dynamics also that can
120 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

also help us see something of the co-constitutive relationship between affect and mean-
ing at work here.4
To understand what I mean by this, we need to move from an idea of representation
to attune ourselves to the revelatory agency inherent in acts of showing. As I have
described elsewhere, Yolngu understand that to show is a deliberate act of making visi-
ble; it is an intervention into a shared and public field of visibility (Deger, 2006). To
show these boys as members of the Datiwuy clan involves arranging them in a particular
way, so that what is quite literally brought to light – what is photographically material-
ized – is actually the underlying dimensions of their relationship, the immanent aspects
of identities which are not visible in every moment, but which are made visible in other
circumstances, most notably in ritual.
And so the leaping shark literally embodies this aesthetic of vital emergence – a
source of power arising into visibility out of dangerous depths. But it’s fun too, there’s a
certain playfulness and novelty that is also the point (cf. Deger, 2013). In many ways, it’s
the newness of the genre that makes it interesting for Yolngu and museum visitors alike,
the novelty brings an energy itself, through the generic template past and present become
recalibrated in a pleasing and meaningful relationship.
If the shark excites because it has become suddenly and ferociously present, these
photographs are also deliberately made to perform – and incite in others – a different
kind of affective movement; one much more closely associated to the oscillating dynamic
of absence–presence made uniquely visible by photography.
Yolngu often translate the special tug and projection of warwuyun as ‘worrying’.
However warwuyun is a more complex, and culturally specific, form of sentimental
labour: separation is acknowledged by deliberately calling up the lurching pain of
absence. This is a highly valued kind of affective labour, a focused and active missing
of either someone, or somewhere, special. (Often a missing loved one, not necessarily
someone already passed away, will be made the subject of warwuyun by imagining
them in an ancestral guise, for instance as a spirit dancing in their country.) Through
the active missing and projective imagining, a connection is claimed, and in some
sense maintained. Individuals orientate towards one and another, grounded in feeling,
even as they are separated (either by life or by death). (Often when I am preparing to
leave Gapuwiyak after a period of fieldwork, people bid farewell by telling me they
will be worrying for me.)
In this respect, this last bit of the story in the curators’ notes above is important. Even
if others don’t recognize the specific emotional registers of warwuyun, and can’t – as
strangers – feel into the photograph’s power as a family portrait, just knowing that these
brothers live in different communities can allow others to recognise how the selection
and arrangement of elements here takes advantage of photography’s power to simultane-
ously mark and mediate separation.
The exhibition offers many variants on this theme (see Figures 5 and 6).

Digital stains of time

As is clearly visible, these photographs have been assembled from multiple sources. The
various stains of colour and digital degradation add to the feeling of life re-assembled;
there’s a temporal depth made visible, even as the images combine to claim a shared
Deger 121

Figure 5. Garkman, Green Frog 2013. Artist: unidentified. Pictured: Marco Watjarr
Garmu, Djanarri Munyarryun, Desmond Munyarryun (decd.), Tyron Biniwarra Garmu, Samo
Dhanbulyun Munyarryun.
These boys call themselves Garkman (Green Frog) because that is their ancestor from wangarr (creative)
times. This photograph is in memory of Desmond who died in 2013. They are all brothers, except
Desmond’s baby son. (Curators’ notes)

Figure 6. The Roots and the Branches, 2014. Artist: Jessica Wantjun.
This old woman, Dorothy Gudaltji, has passed away now. She’s a Wangurri clan woman, you can tell her by
her green coloured dress. Here she is surrounded by her grandchildren. Her gutthara from her daughters
and her gaminyarr from her sons. She is the roots and they are the branches. (Curators’ notes)
122 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

space and time in the present. Creating such an image is slow and careful work, mostly
done by young people in their teens and twenties. While most examples I know come
from young women, it’s not generally regarded as gendered labour. As a new photo-
graphic form it seems to be admired, and sometimes collected, by kin on phones and
tablets across all age groups.
More often than not, these photographs are assembled from personal archives held on
phones and, when people can afford both, on tablets as well. Sometimes in the making of a
collage, a new photograph will be taken, especially when family members are within easy
reach but mostly images are sourced from existing photographs either already collected by
the person assembling the photograph, or otherwise sourced from other family members’
phone-files via Bluetooth exchange. If there are still gaps, family in other communities are
phoned and asked to send pictures through. Likewise photographs from colonial archives, or
a teacher’s photo album, can be snapped straight off screen in an instantaneous act of repa-
triation – and remediation. As they work, the touch screen provides an intensified haptic
relationship with photographs traced, cut, pasted and overlaid by finger; often, too, the peo-
ple in the photographs are stroked and spoken to during these processes of assemblage.
The final photographs are mostly distributed, hand-to-hand from phone-to-phone rather
than via social media sites, which up to this point have had a relatively slow uptake amongst
the people I know in Gapuwiyak. Some of these images have been taken from printed
photos re-photographed on a mobile phone; still others are cropped from other collages,
slotted in with the traces of previous incarnations still visible. As an anthropologist, I am
struck by the radiating and generation-jumping logic of roots and branches and how it dif-
fers from the hierarchies and divisions imposed by the kinship program on my computer.
In these collages, the subjects of photography become united not only thematically
and visually, but ontologically in the sense that otherwise quite distinct and disparate
things – categories of things that would normally be separate because of the very nature
of what they are, or where they came from, or whether they are living or dead – assume
a certain correspondence and co-presence on screen. A sprinkling of digital colour and
light brings everything further to life, including especially any outlying dead zones from
the original photograph.

Making things one

As images move between devices and communities, specific knowledge of exactly who
assembled the image often fails to get passed along. Although a source of pleasure and
pride for those who make them, perhaps like any family photograph, people aren’t that
interested in exactly who took/made the photo. They can guess by looking, the likely
family relationship to the subject. Far more central is their own relationship to the image:
the ways it activates them and the ways they activate it.
During the process of curating the show, Djingawuy Wanambi (in her 20s) spent
many hours lying on my couch assembling photographs on her Samsung touch phone. It
is a laborious process, cutting and pasting by finger, searching through web archives for
frames and backgrounds that suit her subject matter. Often she would work for days on
one photograph. In the videos exhibited on the exhibition website, she speaks in her own
language about the process of making these photographs, but reverts to the English term
Deger 123

‘make-up’ to describe the visual effects she accesses via Google Play to make the photo-
graphs minytjimytjimirr (coloured and patterned). In describing this as ‘make-up’,
Djingawuy tellingly collapses two normally distinct definitions: ‘a means of enhancing
a person’s appearance’ and ‘not real, imaginary, made-up’.
The first, more obvious meaning of ‘make-up’, underlines the work of enhancing the
visual appeal of the photograph and the people depicted. The screen-image becomes a
surface of layers, a skin of sorts: individuals become bound to people and places other than
themselves, through a judicious layering of images and effects that works to highlight cer-
tain essential features, and cover up others. Often the process is indeed beautifying.
The second sense of ‘make-up’, something not real, indicates something less obvious,
but perhaps more crucial about what’s at stake here. These frames and backgrounds are
‘make-up’ precisely because they come from somewhere else: from the internet! – a
generic digital realm of malleable truths and realistic fictions. Apparently belonging to
no-one and no-where in particular (or at least an else-where free from the tight and
always potentially dangerous visual economy in which clan-specific designs circulate),
they can be downloaded and incorporated without hesitation, then put to work to amplify
certain Yolngu truths. In the process of digital incorporation and arrangement, a distinc-
tively Yolngu world is assembled and rendered visible.
Once the ‘make-up’ has been assembled with other elements in the photograph, for
instance in Figure 5, this includes green sprigs of grass, sparkling light and green but-
terflies (a gesture that includes their mother’s clan from the opposite moiety), a generic,
but photorealistic, green frog becomes Garkman and all those boys assembled along its
flank stand united as Munyarryun family. They stand united by the ancestral stories,
songs and ceremonies that marked them as who they are before they were born; united
by truths assembled and brought to light in response to life’s ruptures.
The young people like Djingawuy who make these photographs have neither the
authority nor the knowledge required to paint the ancestral designs closely associated
with ritual. But because this ‘make-up’ comes from this kind of else-where – a place
open to anyone, distinctively outside of a Yolngu world – it means that it can be accessed
freely and with a playfulness, without the kinds of concerns associated with bark paint-
ing, an art form also concerned with creatively figuring – and bringing forth – ancestral
connections through an assemblage of image, colour and pattern. Bark paintings – as
they are made and sold in regional art centres – draw from, and creatively interpret, a
series of clan-based designs to which the artist has certain rights. Although in other com-
munities this is a longstanding art form for which many Yolngu have become internation-
ally famous, in Gapuwiyak, the painting of clan designs for public display remains highly
contentious. The people I work with are highly circumspect with respect to what they
will show or tell of their ‘deep or inside’ public knowledge, especially in the ‘outside’ of
the public arena, because inappropriate revelation of a design element can lead to death
by sorcery. As a result, bark painting is treated as a commercial, intercultural art form
best suited to senior and knowledgeable men. Or, better yet, according to my collabora-
tors, best left alone altogether.
These themes were obliquely referenced in the wall texts for the exhibition Gapuwiyak
Calling in which curators made a direct correlation between bark painting and this form
of digital photography (see Figure 7).
124 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

Figure 7. Mindharr, the colour of Wangurri, 2013. Artist: unidentified. Pictured: Wulula
Munyarryun (decd. 2011).
Mindharr is the name for the green colour of the Wangurri clan. This colour is often shown through the green
flag in ceremonies. In this photo it shows us that this Wangurri woman’s spirit has returned to her land. No
more pain, no more suffering. The lights show she’s happy. Can you see the blue background around her? It
looks like water. Maybe the lights represent the sparkling water. There’s a Wangurri expression dhalatji bik
that refers to calm water after flood. Here that meaning extends to ‘rest in peace’. (Curators’ notes)

Some balanda (non-Aboriginal people) like to hang Yolngu bark paintings in their homes and
museums. We don’t do that. In our lives those ochre painted sacred designs called gamunungu
belong in ceremony.

But now there’s something new. Young people have started using their phones to transform
photographs into gamunungu. And Yolngu love it. (Curators’ notes)

This is my favourite photograph from the exhibition. I love it for the way that the cura-
tors’ notes show how affect and meaning can work together, amplifying vision and
understanding. I love it too for the curious and tentative explanations my Yolngu co-
curators offered in response, as they pieced together a story. As in the previous image, the
colour of clothing has been changed, an effect that unifies the visual field – while signal-
ling this woman’s relationship to her ancestral homeland and the ceremonies that she
would have danced throughout her life, until her own spirit was guided back to her clan
waters in the songs and dancing of a green-flag funeral.5
Deeply sentimental, these images strike complex emotional chords. The layered bling
of the ‘happy’ lights signals depths beneath the surface. While the application of these
Deger 125

glowing effects might act as a kind of balm for grief and loss, the assembling of the pho-
tograph entails a wilful scratching of the wound of loss; the allure of the lights dependent
on a deeper willingness to not look away from death itself. (And it’s not just through
photographs that Yolngu spend time with death. Their funerals often last two weeks or
longer, during which time family members live in close proximity to the coffin and the
metamorphosing body within.)
The affective field of light might be translated into language and explained as a recog-
nisable emotion such as ‘happiness’, but this happiness arises out of a backdrop of loss
and sorrow. Here then the lights twinkle with the potentiality of the emotional metamor-
phosis that accompanies the other profound transformations wrought with death. Through
the shimmering effect for which Yolngu are so well known in their bark paintings, the
surface of visible is simultaneously intensified and made permeable. Made to oscillate not
only with light effects, but also with photography’s unique capacity to make absence pre-
sent, the screen-image becomes porous: a site of emergence. As with the shark pressing up
and out of the water, we get a sense of a pushing through from somewhere else, a sense
that the photograph’s true subject comes from somewhere else, somewhere we generally
don’t get to see or inhabit; somewhere beyond the usual parameters of the visible.
Djingawuy describes the aim of this assembly as the task of ‘making things one’. By
this she refers not only to the creative work that brings digital material of diverse origins
into relation with each other, but uniting personal biographies, ancestral stories, as fami-
lies are made – and held – as ‘one’ in the shared plane of the glowing screen. All the while,
the dense screen surfaces of these photo gamunugnu remain exactly that – surfaces
through which those who know the stories can perceive deeper truths.
In Daddy & Mum (Figure 8), as the curators explain, the flashing lights of the .gif
express on-going care and acts of warrwarryun: a desire to aesthetically transform the
experience of loss and separation for photographic subjects as much as for family mem-
bers passing the small screens of their phones from hand to hand. This is made possible
by the light which is not simply coded as ‘happy’ but which produces an affective field
that registers as what Donald Thomson long ago documented as ‘the uplift of looking’
produced by light in Yolngu aesthetics (Morphy, 1989).6 And so this photograph is made
to generate an encompassing field of ‘happiness’ intended to hold both subjects and
viewers, to comfort all, and mark a particular mood in the face of the unruly affects that
photographs of lost loved ones can stir. All the while performing the comforting poetics
of ‘promised land’ in a way that literally frames Christian beliefs in the soul’s accent to
Heaven within Yolngu beliefs regarding the ways that the spirits of the dead return to
their ancestral homeland.7
But there are distinctive differences from bark paintings at play here. These images
are also animated by a kind of surface tension between the ‘secular’ and the ‘sacred’.
Concerned with supplementing the camera’s capacity to see, and informed by an intimate
knowledge of the power of revelation, these new photographic art forms steer clear of
anything that might be deemed dhuyu (sacred, dangerous, not for public view). Instead
they seek out the invisible through the register of affect. Deep feelings, rather than deep
(and secret) meanings are brought to the surface. A dense, and often difficult, field of
sentiment is performatively writ large on screens that pulse with an interweaving of
affect and meaning.
126 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

Figure 8. Daddy & Mum, 2013. Artist: unidentified.Pictured: Joe Ngulundurowuy Garawirrtja
(decd. 2009) and Nimatja Ganambarr (decd. 2013).
This couple have both passed away now. The man was a minister. We used to call him Bapa (father) Joe.
Because they were both Christian we see them here in a Paradise Land, or wangangora (promised land). The
gold especially represents this. The hearts show their children missing them. The flashing lights make those
the feelings of love, sorrow and joy rise up when we see this picture. (Curators’ notes)

It is this deliberate interweaving of affective and visual processes that makes these
photographs distinctive – and socially powerful. The interlocking love hearts, sparkling
lights, fields of colour, worlds of love and missing hold their subjects in an intensified
field of colour and light.8 Like a bark painting aesthetically transformed by the final
application of cross-hatched lines (Morphy, 1989) – an ontological turning point as the
artist’s careful aesthetic labour creates a shimmering field of light through which the
gamunungu ‘show themselves’ (Deger, 2006) – the screen provides a surface at once
dense and permeable. The image in this state invites seeing of a different order to the
plain photograph, the light seeming to emit from within, breaking open the surface of the
visible so that a rising up of emotions, memories and meanings coalesces in a pattern of
deep kinship, felt as much as known.
Far from the private wounding of Barthes’ punctum, the relationships that are stirred
through this screen work always exceed the one-to-one. This is highly affective social
labour, contagious and transformative. The intensification on the surface of the image
using colour and light, invites others to ‘worry’ for the photographic subject(s). Transferred
between family members from phone to phone to iPad these photographs are viewed and
Deger 127

Figure 9. Happy Birthday Dad, Nicole Deger-Beauman, 2014. Pictured: Kit Deger (decd. 2012).

shared in quiet moments of reflection – moments in which people deliberately stir them-
selves to deep feeling, deliberately calling to mind associated images and memories, ori-
entating themselves inwards and outwards. Stored in memory cards now large enough to
hold personal collections of video and photographs (and therefore not requiring the dele-
tion of old images to make way for new ones), the photographs accrue as a distributed
archive of affect.9

Happy Birthday Dad, 2014

Yolngu can teach us a great deal about the social potential of digital thickenings, and
indeed, about stubborn forms of vitality more generally. Yet while the photography I
describe above is, of course, extremely context specific, and mobilized with a highly
attuned awareness of the socially constitutive power of images, it seems to me that thick
photography is not unique to Arnhem Land.
To mark this thought, I offer a photograph from my own family (see Figure 9). It is
photo-shopped on a laptop, not phone-made. But, with unsettling serendipity, it arrived
on my phone several weeks ago from my niece studying media communications in
Berlin. She made it on the birthday of her father, my brother, who died suddenly a couple
of years ago after an extended surfing trip. We’d flown together to Fiji cremate him and
to scatter his ashes at some of his favourite spots.
As I look at the screen, this image resonates with all kinds of thickness, digital and
otherwise. I recognize family photos, old and new, assembled with love, melancholy and
resignation. I feel her longing for connection as well as my own loss. I see the time my
128 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

niece has taken to make this image for her father’s Facebook page. I know her determina-
tion not to wallow.
Spending time with this image (I tried writing ‘my brother’ instead of ‘image’, but it
was not the truth) is instructive. It makes me realize that Yolngu always look down the
lens of the camera when posing for a photograph, as if every photographic pose pre-
assumes their status as active subjects in the image. In fact, many Yolngu are made uneasy
by archival photographs of family members gazing past the camera. It’s taken as a form
of refusal in the present: an active looking away. In contrast, by meeting the gaze of the
viewer, the space between the viewer and photographic subject becomes thick with the
possibilities of (re)encounter. By looking us straight in the eye, the Yolngu in these photo-
graphs above seem to proclaim their own centrality in this art of re-materialization; con-
sciously assuming their place as active participants in these acts of thick photography.
As these thoughts cascade, I wish my brother would turn his head.

Thick photography, thickened worlds

Simply stated, thick photography sets things, people and places in relationship. In thick
photography, the visual field is assembled and intensified, even as it extends beneath and
beyond the surface of the image; the photographic ‘moment’ is deliberately deepened –
both affectively and temporally; resonant truths are brought into visibility; spectral forces
weave fragile worlds.
Thick photography is performative, often intermedial. Originality and authenticity are
far less significant than the creative work of remediation. In thick photography, it makes
no sense to distinguish between the real and the digital-born; life inheres in coded pixels
as much as anywhere else. And yet, for all of this, thick photography still relies on some
kind of original, lens-made content as an ontological touchstone for the truths it seeks to
amplify.
Often playful, thick photography is nonetheless suited to the most serious – and painful
– of subjects. It’s a kind of poetry. Affect and meaning are made co-constitutive. Truths
arrive with a shudder; viewers contribute their own animating overlay of imagination and
memory. This is because – again, like poetry – thick photography is a participatory art.
Thick photography invites us to recognise realities made visible in the remix.10
The aim of this essay has been to give substance to these assertions. There are many
dimensions to the thickness of the photographs reproduced here; many layers of affect
and meaning brought to light in the glow of mobile phone screens. Firstly, there is the
luminous substantiality provided by the screen itself: the new materiality of flux, depth
and transformation identified by Bruno (2014) as a crucial and defining surface condi-
tion of the contemporary. This invites new forms of haptic engagement, as well as pro-
viding a certain substrate of visual allure. Then there is the specific density of meaning
and kinship created through processes of internet-assisted assemblage. Layered on top of
this – although, importantly, appearing to emanate from the image itself – is the added
light and colour, the digital bling that brings an overarching effect of animation while
unifying the photographic ‘real’ with digitally ‘made up’ to reveal underlying truths –
and to produce a shared sense of ‘happiness’ in the face of the absences and losses that
photography has always highlighted.
Deger 129

Photographic images act as surfaces textured by light, colour and pattern; cut, shrunk,
and pushed into place by patient fingers squeezing and sliding across the screen, the
photographs become ‘one’, dense with meaning, affect and a quality of depth. In one
sense, the photographic layers generated on the screen extend Edwards’s (2012) charac-
terisation of the photograph as a laminated object. Yet I worry that by insisting on its
status as object, we fix photography in a certain way, thereby losing sight of the ways the
screen is exploited as a deep and pervious surface eminently suitable for the work of
materialisation.
It is into these depths that individuals cropped from other photographs (and other
poses of patterned relationship) become positioned, taking their place within what
becomes an animated field of coalescence. Time is refigured. Pulsing with relationships
generated within and beyond the screen, disparate things (and people and places) become
‘one’ as Yolngu turn to Imikimi and other sites as a means to produce new kinds of gamu-
nungu, previously only rendered for the outside world through sober ochres painted on
bark. And so what Bruno celebrates as the new materiality of the screen – the permeable
membrane of connectivity and depth through which so much of our life is now lived –
may not be so very different from the layers of colour and pattern that have been applied
to barks and bodies for generations extending way, way past the reach of memory.
Using the screen as a participatory surface of play and transformation, thick photog-
raphers work with layers of colour, pattern and light to remix the visible world.
Photography becomes a technology for materialising relations – between people, places,
and technologies – rather than recording the real. But although the luminous and layered
materiality of these screen-photographs provides much of their animating depth and tex-
ture, thick photography is not digital by definition. There is an art to it that matters most.
In some ways they are just like selfies, these photos that deliberately arrange and
project individuals into social networks. Yet, if these images are all about surface, it is a
surface of a different kind to that generally associated with selfies. It is a surface with
depth. Affirming generative and relational ways of seeing, these images performatively
insist on a ‘depth of field’ both within the frame and the viewer looking on. Indeed, in the
examples above, the normally invisible modality of sensuous world making is made all
the more powerful by the very fact that outsiders, beyond the intimacy of social net-
works, will inevitably fail to perceive the woven thicknesses of these images.
This photography adds new dimensions of flux to contemporary lifeworlds. It pro-
duces a form of social thickening as affect, memory and afterimage lodge in bodies,
images, places, imaginations, providing flickering moments of affirmation and coales-
cence. For Yolngu especially, the result is a synesthetic quickening that happens not only
on and within the screen, but within a broader world of responsive sentience in which the
living cohabit with the immanent forces and spectres of the land and sea.
In all these ways, thick photography acts as a participatory art of immanence. In the pro-
cess, it affirms for Yolngu a very different kind of world of obligation and responsibility than
that being imposed by bureaucrats charged with bringing them into mainstream society. By
thickening a world of enduring ancestral resonance, this art has much more in common with
‘traditional’ modes of Yolngu ritual performance and art than the postcolonial-inflected
assemblages of renowned Aboriginal artists such as Tracey Moffatt or Brooke Andrew. This,
after all, is family portraiture. Critique is not the aim. The art is sincere and sentimental; its
130 Journal of Material Culture 21(1)

politics arguably more radical because it is so deeply – and quite literally – grounded in
Yolngu points of reference. Instead of engaging with a politics of negation, thick photography
performs small acts of creative affirmation (Braidotti, 2010).11 Through these quiet acts of
incorporation – mobile phones, patterned blankets, red jumpsuits, interlinking hearts, digital
bling, giant photo-frogs – this photography demonstrates that the transformative arc of assim-
ilation can run both ways.

Acknowledgements
I am indebted to the generous insights and friendship of my Miyarrka Media collaborators:
Meredith Balanydjalk, Warren Balpatji, James Bangaliwuy, Kylie Djingawuy, Enid Gurulngmi
and Paul Gurrumuruwuy and also to the family members who have given permission for these
images to be reproduced and circulated in these academic contexts. Many thanks also to Nicole
Deger-Beauman for the image above. Conversations with Diana Young, Jane Sloan, John von
Sturmer, Melinda Hinkson, Fred Myers, Cathy Greenhalgh and Haidy Geismar infuse the ideas
above in lasting ways for which I am grateful.

Funding
The research and exhibition making was funded by an Australian Research Council Future
Fellowship, and also supported by the University of Queensland Anthropology Museum, Arts NT
and the Gapuwiyak Culture and Arts Aboriginal Corporation. Many thanks to Lay’pu Wunungmurra,
Susan Marrawungu, and Nicole Deger-Beauman for additional image permissions. Conversations
with Diana Young, Jane Sloan, John von Sturmer, Melinda Hinkson, Fred Myers, Cathy Greenhalgh
and Haidy Geismar infuse the ideas above in lasting ways for which I am grateful.

Notes
1. See Joshua Bell and Haidy Geismar’s (2009:3) call for an attention to ‘the term materialisa-
tion’ (rather than material culture or materiality) to capture the vitality of the lived processes
by which ideas of objectivity and subjectivity, persons and things, minds and bodies are
entangled.
2. This means I must mostly leave an analysis of the constitutive effects of their movements
between screens, as well as a discussion of the projective dynamics inherent in phone-made
photography for another time.
3. Gapuwiyak Calling was first exhibited at the University of Queensland Anthropology
Museum, 15 March – 15 August 2014 (http://www.anthropologymuseum.uq.edu.au/gapuwi-
yak-calling); a second re-designed show featured at the American Museum of Natural History
as part of the Margaret Mead Film Festival 2014 (http://www.amnh.org/explore/margaret-
mead-film-festival/history-archives/margaret-mead-film-festival-20142/events); a third exhi-
bition was held at the Cairns Institute, James Cook University, 16 September – 16 October
2015 (http://gapuwiyakcalling.com/).
4. This formulation goes against the foundations of affect theory advanced by Brian Massumi
(1996) which posits affects as both distinct from and prior to meaning. But see Hemmings
(2005) for a critique of autonomous affect theorized in isolation from social narratives and
power relations.
5. These collages create a ‘fabulous space’ of a quite different order to the Nagda photographic
collages described by Christopher Pinney (1997:134) as a compacted and constructed ‘dream
world’. Here the compacting of time and space within the frame is about locating the subjects
within a geographically specific one-ness of shared ancestral belonging.
Deger 131

6. The place of light in Yolngu aesthetics and material culture has been widely recognized in the
literature beginning with Donald Thompson’s fieldnotes from 1937 (cited in Morphy, 1989:
28) and in Howard Morphy’s landmark essay ‘From dull to brilliant’ (1989), through Deger
(2006), Magowan (2007) and Toner (2007).
7. See Fiona Magowan’s (2007: 103–121) discussions of the performative and synthesizing
dynamics of Yolngu Christianity, including the place of light in song and the synesthetics of
‘seeing in sound’.
8. See Jennifer Biddle’s (2007) seminal discussions on the primary role of affect in central desert
Aboriginal painting.
9. Thanks to Haidy Geismar for making this connection.
10. See Jessica de Largy Healy (2013) for another account of Yolngu screen-based re-mediations.
11. This idea, and indeed the thrust of the entire essay, resonates strongly with Elizabeth
Povinelli’s (2006, 2011) sustained and insightful attention to the place of intimacy and the
particularities of lived thickness as it matters for her Aboriginal friends in north Australia.

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Filmography
Gurrumuruwuy P, Yangathu F, Deger J and Mackenzie D (2011) Manapanmirr, in Christmas
Spirit, Miyarrka Media, 60 mins.

Author biography
Jennifer Deger is an anthropologist, filmmaker and research leader at the Cairns Institute, James
Cook University. Her research explores digital media, social creativity and experimental museol-
ogy with a collaborative, practice-led methodology that works the intersections of ethnography, art
and Yolngu ritual. Jennifer has published widely on visual culture and indigenous aesthetics. A
founding member of Miyarrka Media, a collective of Aboriginal and non-indigenous artists and
filmmakers based in the community of Gapuwiyak in northeast Arnhem Land (http://miyarrkame-
dia.com), Deger co-directed and produced the award winning films Manapanmirr, in Christmas
Spirit (2012) and Ringtone (2014). Miyarrka Media are currently working on a co-authored book
about phone-made media and shared anthropology.