Flash of Recognition

Some photographs change the way we think about history and the world. As a student many years ago, Jane Lydon was shocked by the photograph on the cover of Charles Rowley’s 1972 classic, The Destruction of Aboriginal Society, which showed two Aboriginal men in heavy neck-chains. In The Flash of Recognition: Photography and the emergence of indigenous rights, she uses photography to tell a bigger story of the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia. While many of the images are shocking, the book tells the positive story of the way in which photography has been used as a tool for change.

While most accounts of colonial photography have emphasised the medium’s controlling and destructive effects upon its Indigenous subjects, Lydon shows how, from its earliest Australian uses, photography was used to argue for the humanity and better treatment of Aboriginal peoples.

Lydon’s scope is broad and ambitious, reaching across time and country, covering remote, rural and urban Australia. Starting essentially in the 1920s and continuing to the near-present, and using over 100 images, this book will demonstrate the continuing power of photography to shape race relations and identities in our own time.