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JW Lindt's Colonial Man and Aborigine Image from The Cultural Relativity as Exchange: J.W. Lindt’s Colonial man and Aborigine image from the GRAFTON ALBUM (circa 1872): Introduction Colonial representations about culture reflect and influence our perceptions even as artefacts. Under scrutiny here is an image from one of J.W. Lindt’s Albums of Australian Aboriginals, a still-intact album of photographs given to the mayor of Grafton, Tomas Page, circa 1872 when Lindt was resident therei. I have given the original untitled image the notional title of Colonial man and Aborigine. ii Lindt spent a year travelling southern Australia on his arrival in 1861 and five years in Grafton as an apprentice in Conrad Wagner’s photographic studio. Lindt’s education and understanding of the arts was already liberal and Wagner, dubbed “our local Raphael”iii by the Grafton paper, extended his skills. Lindt’s temperament was sociable, energetic, and discerning, a crucible for both observing and interpreting culture. That Lindt had the artistic understanding to construct an image such as Colonial Man and Aborigine as a symbolic reference to culture is quite certain. That his cultural relativity may have provided the inclination is suggested here. The Photographic Art According to Gross, “in order for a researcher to decide whether an interpretation is… inferential (the observer is assessing the event as "art"--a symbolic event), one needs to know the grounds on which the conclusions would be justified. …we might say that we know it because we are assuming the event was made to happen that way in order to tell us something (communicational inference). iv For the purposes of interpretation, the context of Lindt’s work can reliably establish that his primary purpose was one of artistic practice. Indeed, Lindt’s carte d’visite mount proclaims, “Home’s chief adornment And life’s fairest grace Is Art, and therefore give it honoured place. On chemistry and optics, All does not depend; Art must with these, In triple union blend”. Figure 1 J.W. Lindt’s Collins St. photographic mounting card The list of his wares includes “Album of Australian Aboriginals” and “Genre Pictures of Bush Characters” that he started while in Grafton, which gives his work some ethnographic overtones. Images were certainly “selected from Mr. Lindt’s studio at Grafton, and others were “photographs of aboriginals, taken for Signor D’Albertus, an Italian naturalist now on a visit to this district” (Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 8 December, 1874), but we need to be reminded that the differentiation between artistry and documentary had not yet been clearly established, and artistry was the predominant mode of working. To aim for a type, a generality, rather than individuality, was standard practice for art photography and it was from here that Lindt took his cues for his “Genre pictures” and “Australian Aboriginals”.v In Lindt’s time, the act of artmaking was not so categorically distinguished from the act of photographing, where one (art) is intentionally symbolic and the other (photography) is not. Even contemporarily, “A portrait clearly is an event that is not the "real thing," but it is clearly as if it is the real thing”. vi Within the paradigm of photography in 1870, spectators perceived studio illusion and generic subjects as the real thing. According to a local review, “They represent very faithfully aboriginals, male and female, of all ages, as the traveller finds them in the wilds, and not as if prepared for portraiture” (Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 8 December, 1874). The symbolic gestures (art) reflected and constructed real experience. “Lindt used techniques which derived from traditional European painting practices and which were then common in portrait photography. …The landscape or interior background on to which the figures were later superimposed gave added information, expressed either overtly or symbolically”vii. Even with his equipment, Lindt references art: “J.W. Lindt begs to inform his friends and the public that he has now received, ex ship Nourmahal, the new instruments and chemicals he expected from Europe, and which have been selected for him by first-class artists” (Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 10 January, 1871). Reconciliatory symbolism in Colonial Man and Aborigine “One should distinguish between the photograph as a record about culture and the photograph as a record of culture… in the hands of well-trained observers, [photography] has become a tool for recording, not the truth of what is out there, but the truth about what is in there”… [ in the mind]viii. However random the act, photographing is to a degree a reflection about what is in the mind of the photographer, but the degree of intentionality and purpose may be hard to determine. Still, to be assured of a reasonable analysis, “…only when an interpretive strategy assumes that production and transmission are articulatory and intentional can communicational meaning be inferred”ix. We can start our assumption of intentionality with the procedures that Lindt employed in his studio set-up. “The new studio is built on the most approved principle, and is replete in every modern improvement and perfect arrangement for regulating light and shade. …I shall call into requisition, Retouching the negative, Tinting and Colouring the finished print, as well as Combination printing and Natural clouds and sky effects in Landscape; in short, all the possible means to enhance the beauty, Value and Durability of the pictures” (Clarence and Richmond Examiner, 18 March, 1873). In carefully studying his photographs of Aborigines, it is clear that he enhanced the definition of dark facial features by adding a few dabs and stippled lines of blockout with a tiny brush on the back of the negative plate before printing. Very similar treatment of lips, noses and cheekbones can be detected throughout his collection, and are apparent in the image of Colonial Man and Aborigine. There are a few repeats of the elaborately painted backdrops in the Grafton album and it is likely that several of the sittings were carried out at the same time. Do we then assume that the images in the album are intentionally variations on a theme? In most cases, they appear to be so. There are repetitive poses with a revolving selection of generic artifacts. A woven fishing trap appears in many of the images, as do boomerangs and a wooden shield. Weapons such as a spear and a wooden bludgeon or club appear in several images. A dingo-tail headdress appears in three of the images, twice on women and once on a man. A metal axe is present in the hand of an Aboriginal man and woman in two separate images, and once lying on the ground. The same Aborigine in the Colonial Man and Aborigine image appears three times. We can tell it is the same man by his facial features, his hair and beard, the scarring and slight deformity in the bone structure of his leg, as well as scars on his arm and shoulder. In one image, the Aborigine is seated on the same canvas covered seat, or ‘rock’, holding a woven fishing trap. Beside him are a shield and two boomerangs. These artifacts are clearly indigenous. In the other image, he is holding a rifle. What is significant about Colonial Man and Aborigine is that it sets a new theme. The image is the only image with a Caucasian person in the Grafton Album and one of the few such images in Lindt’s entire output. It articulates new meanings and invites speculation on its intentionality, which I have termed reconciliatory. Figure 2 J.W. Lindt, untitled photograph, circa 1872. Collection of Clarence River Historical Society, Grafton, NSW Lindt may have settled their gazes to prevent movement, but the Colonial man is looking fixedly into the distance stage right and the Aboriginal man is looking into the camera lens, a direct gaze to the spectator. His look is sanguine, not apprehensive. The arrangement of the figures is necessarily intentional, but even if it were collaborative, as Coleman claims with Curtis, our interpretation would not alter overall. x In fact, collaboration would confirm a reconciliatory perspective. Descriptively, the Colonial man is seated on a raised canvas ‘rock’ and the Aborigine is on the ground, with his head leaning upon the leg of the other. There is a saddle and bridle on one side of them, resting against a silky oak ‘tree’, and what appears to be a pipe with a tobacco tin and a stockman’s whip on the ground to the left. The colonial man has a leather container slung over his shoulder and he holds a spear. The Aborigine holds a rifle, yet he arrangement of the figures implies no confrontation between them. Interpretively, the relationship between the two men in the image has some aspects that are conventional and some aspects that are not conventional. As Sol Worth says, “It puts things together both as they are and as they are not”. Such contradiction is described as a visual metaphor, “where we understand metaphor as a formal device or structure demanding some kind of active interpretive behavior”xi. What is conventional is that the Aborigine is in a diminutive position compared to the Colonial man. The contradiction starts with the implied closeness between them, with the Aborigine’s head resting against the other man’s leg. Even contemporarily, this would be an unconventional occurrence. The relational pose is equivocal, implying subservience, but also mateship. The contradiction is clear with the position of the main weapons where the normal conventions are reversed; the Aboriginal man has the rifle (non-indigenous), and the colonial man the spear (indigenous). In view of the album image of the same Aboriginal man with the same rifle, we may think of the image under scrutiny as a variation on a theme.
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