title: Beyond the Forensic and Heroic: Exploring new narratives in palaeontological field photography.
Creators: name: Hilder, Elise Margaret
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2018
Subjects: subject: Forensic
subject: Heroic
subject: Palaeontological
subject: Photography
subject: Archaeological

description: Since the early nineteenth century photographers and palaeontologists have worked side by side in the field. However, this relationship—while intimate—has been unequal (Bohrer 2011; Hauser 2007; Smiles and Moser 2005). According to art historian Frederick Bohrer (2011), there is the assumption—albeit a gross overgeneralisation—that archaeological and palaeontological photographs are by necessity artless, forensic, and depersonalising. That is, the critical role of the photograph in contributing its own interpretive and expressive discourse has largely been reduced to a discussion of how it operates in the service of science, both as a forensic recording device, and an editorially and commercially picturesque illustration of heroic science stories. As such, digging is either sanitised, simplified, or sensationalised—downplaying the pictorial and anthropological idiosyncrasies of fieldwork. This is because dominant photographic image conventions favour official records over individual experience and innovative representation of fieldwork. Therefore, while the photograph has maintained a stronghold in palaeontological and archaeological cultures, it is both a privileged position and a burden for photographic researchers wishing to go beyond standard codes and conventions of image production. In response to this, Beyond the Forensic and Heroic explores how photographic documentary-art practice can offer an alternative representation of palaeontological fieldwork. Three visual frameworks have informed the theoretical and visual parameters of this research. The first framework focuses on retrospective historiographic inquiry, or the artist as historian mode of research. This approach partners photographic artmaking with historiographic practice (here, the historical-scientific practice of palaeontological fieldwork), to consider new ways of representing the study of history. The second framework calls for immersive, authentic, yet autonomous photographic practice that unfolds through visual, ethnographic immersion in digging communities. The third framework acknowledges the phenomenological centredness and reflexivity of embodied, visual research. This encompasses my personal response to the digging sites as I move about and encounter them. It explores how I choose to photographically reconstruct the digging spaces through post-production image combinations that challenge the seamless, predictable, and depersonalised photographic record. Working with both the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum and the Queensland Museum Geosciences Department has enabled me to explore the strategies outlined and create new possibilities that reconsider the forensic and heroic traditions of the field photography genre. The remote Central Queensland township of Winton and the towns of Rockhampton and Nebo in Northern Queensland are dynamic hubs of activity where palaeontologists and volunteers alike gather at restricted sites to dig for prehistory. It is towards these communities of diggers—along with the by-products of their labour, and the fossil forms they excavate—that my camera is focused.