After Two Hundred Years: Photographic Essays of Aboriginal and Islander Australia Today
After Two Hundred Years is a brilliant book of social documentary photography which will help you understand all the complexity of contemporary indigenous and islander communities.
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies organised the project. The book was published in 1988 as a Bicentennial project (the first European settlers arrived in Australia in 178 
to ‘document through photographs and texts the diversity of Aboriginal and Islander life in Australia in the late 1980s’.
The project aims to challenge misrepresentations of indigenous people such as: ’the noble savage on the one hand, living a traditional, pre-contact pattern of life; on the other, the passive broken victim, living on the fringes of non-Aboriginal society’.
Over 20 Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal photographers lived with indigenous communities all over Australia for up to two months, and they took 50,000 photographs. The Aboriginal communities cooperated with photographers and also directed their photography; and the communities also selected the photographs they wanted to be published in the book from among 50,000 photographs taken.
Some quotes from Introduction by Penny Taylor:
The project has attempted to redirect the imagery of Aboriginal Australia in two main ways-both of which have been exploratory.
The principal aim was to represent the diversity of Aboriginal Australia, to move into everyday worlds of Aboriginal work, play, home and neighbourhood. These are the areas excluded from a photographic obsession which has focused on the exotic, the ‘authentic’ and ‘the traditional’. This approach demanded that the Project address the actual distribution of people throughout the country to counter the widely held assumption that ‘real’ Aborigines live exclusively in remote Australia.
The second, more problematic, aim was to engage maximum involvement of Aboriginal people in making a statement about their lifestyle, in their own terms. There is a growing literature on how photographs mislead, how they are fitted into political agendas to reinforce dominant power structures, and how people read photographs differently, all of which was pertinent to this project. If Aboriginal involvement was more than a token gesture, a methodology was required which would subvert both the cultural bias of the photographic perspective and the authoritarianism of the camera lens which epitomises the subject-object dichotomy of white-black relations.
We relied on a combination of recent advances in theories of representation and photodocumentary ethics and on certain understandings of the interests of the participants themselves. The approach we developed aimed for a genre of collaborative documentary photography in which the participants could control and direct the work of the photographer, the selection of images and the texts that would accompany them. It was a method which attempted to develop a long term model of cooperation between an institution and Aboriginal constituents, between an archive and the people whose images would fill it, between photographers and their subjects, between different classes of people, between strangers and friends.
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Aboriginal Australia, Indigenous Peoples, Photography | 
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