Archive Apparitions:
Elisa deCourcy

Archive Apparitions continues conversations around colonisation, race, femininity, work and mobility, and photographic custodianship that began in the mid-nineteenth-century photography studio. With collaborating photographers, Craig Tuffin and James Tylor, deCourcy reactivated the daguerreotype process as it was executed in the 1840s.

In the mid-nineteenth century, both settler-colonists and First Nations people brought objects to the photography studio: books, letters from loved ones, cloaks, shields, heirlooms and even other photographs to  narrate their personal biographies and relationships to family, kin and Country outside the frame.

The visual narratives constructed in this contemporary series gesture to engagements with the past. Presented here are portraits of living people, who have various personal and professional relationships with historic colonial Australian photography, which are narrated through historic portrait devices.

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