PHOTOGRAPHS AND THE SOUND OF HISTORY

This article explores the nature of photographs as relational objects in the making and articulating of histories. It argues that, in the contexts of indigenous and cross‐cultural histories in Australia and elsewhere, photographs have a relational quality, occupying the spaces between people and people and people and things. They are socially salient objects and tactile, sensorially engaged objects that exist in time and space and thus in social and cultural experience. As such, they operate not only at a visual level but become absorbed into other ways of telling history. Photographs become not simply visual history but crucially, oral history, linked to sound, gesture and relationships .