For Melbourne photographer Atong Atem, image-making offers a way to unearth secret histories and reclaim lives unseen.

By Neha Kale OCT 2016

Seeing can be synonymous with discovering. We often forget that the things we look at aren’t made real by the act of looking but inhabit universes of their own. This hit me with a jolt the first time I stumbled upon an image of two women, staring defiantly at the viewer against a patterned backdrop by Atong Atem at Gertrude Contemporary earlier this year. The Melbourne artist, who moved to Australia from Bor, South Sudan as a child, draws on the legacy of African photographers such as Malick Sidibé, whose images capture the freewheeling energy of post-independence Mali, and Seydou Keïta, whose studio portraits are a joyous corrective to dour, ethnographic studies. Her images use African iconography — wax print fabrics, headdresses, flowers — to offer a visual affront to a world intent on both cashing in on blackness and finding new ways to revive the old, colonial gaze. VAULT caught up with Atem, who’s shown her work at Red Hook Labs in Brooklyn and Amsterdam’s Unseen Photo Fair, to talk about the politics of looking and the power of making images that shake off historical weight.

Earlier this year, you exhibited a body of work, Studio Series, at Gertrude Contemporary and also showed as part of New African Photography at Red Hook labs in Brooklyn. When did you first start taking photos?
When I was first studying architecture at university in 2010, I was just out of high school and didn’t have a solid understanding of race and colonialism, which are a big part of my practice now. It was so exciting when I started coming across those themes... Subscribe to read this article in full