My PhD dissertation is now available as an open-access document. To view click here.

Description

This practice-led doctoral project focuses on a micro-community setting at Kainake Village, located in the Siwai region of Bougainville, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea. Through cameraless photographic techniques, the project chronicles traditional medicinal plants as a core value of the Siwai people for cultural preservation. The project acknowledges that misaligned visual representations of community and their relationships to the environment can lead to an erasure of localised contexts, intergenerational fracturing and a sense of disempowerment within the community. Theory reveals that colonial characteristics of extraction, exploitation or an exacerbation of the 'other' is evident in photographic history, particularly by Western photographers who work in Indigenous contexts. The aim of this research is to critique these problematic approaches so that points of departure may be found for the empowered and harmonious photographic chronicling of community. The objective of this project is to investigate how photographic processes can embody a community's social and cultural values. The research seeks to find methods of aligning to the photographic chronicling of community with a more ethical strategy and of conveying a sense of embodiment and connectedness. It reveals that if a photographic practitioner aligns and adheres to the community and land contexts within which they are working-during, within and after a project-a decolonised approach to image making and dissemination will unfold and be nurtured.