The extraordinary photographs depicted throughout this book Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies touch on the beauty and trauma of Aboriginal lives. From Eastern Arnhem Land to western New South Wales and beyond, the depiction of Aboriginal people from early frontier and settler times to the present day is at once confronting, and then positively liberating! Those who have worked with such conflicting and inspirational photographic archives know the bittersweet pill of how we ask the questions: should we remember, do we want to remember, and how do we make this happen? There is no real fast or true rule for all. But in Lydon’s book, there is a way-finder.

Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies’ cohesive netting of diverse community stories and images parallel international modes of documentation. Australia’s own trauma-scape can sit alongside the photographic evidence of the victims of Second World War, Pol Pot, and the disappeared of Chile and Argentina.

This inspirational book recalls personal and institutional histories and custodianship, collaborations and family passions that keep alive the memories that were systematically eradicated, divided or documented for the global currency of science, romance, fascination and tourism. The photographic evidence of the mostly nameless people originally photographed for nostalgia, is re-visited, re-expressed and re-positioned to re-divert the gaze.

The breath of fresh air in Calling the Shots: Aboriginal Photographies is the inclusion of historical research of diverse photographic documentary histories told by strong Indigenous voices that provide a curative to the dominant western historical narrative.

Energised by Lydon’s book, we should come together and speak about our histories through photographs, no matter how far and wide we are from our families today, no matter how difficult; it reminds us that we can keep alive important histories — and make action for healing, inspiration and cultural-worth. This book allows us to unpack, re-piece and juxtapose divergent photographic stories about how and why photographs of Aboriginal people were made and kept.

Read on and see, feel and share the unravelling…there has been change in the air, and it just got crisper.

Brook Andrew, Artist

Calling the Shots is a welcome intervention into an emerging literature on photographies’ other histories, an exciting work for those interested in photographic history, visual culture, decolonized history, and indigeneity. The volume draws on remarkable archives of images made of and at times by Indigenous Australians; in all cases, these archives are being reclaimed by those whose images were taken. Readers are invited to reflect with the authors — a robust combination of Indigenous and non-indigenous scholars — on a wide range of work, from the earliest photographic encounters on the continent only two years after the invention of the medium, to more recent collections emerging from family archives and Aboriginal cultural activists. In short, this collection brings us the richness of rarely seen images and rarely heard Indigenous Australian perspectives on photography that engages their past, present, and future with great insight and sensitivity.

Professor Faye Ginsburg, New York University, Director, Center for Media, Culture and History