“We need to understand photography as part of racial capitalism”. So writes Ariella Azoulay, correctly insisting that we regard the global dissemination of photography as an imperial exercise of power and domination. But it is Azoulay who has also sought to persuade us that photographs are relational entities whose meanings and effects are generated by their viewers and subjects as much as by their makers. This paper pursues that line of thinking while asking what actually happened when photography and Indigenous Australians encountered one another for the first time. A close study of a group of daguerreotypes of Indigenous Australians, taken in 1847 in Melbourne by Douglas Kilburn, and of French lithographs made after daguerreotypes that also feature native Australians, provides evidence that their subjects were agents in, as well as victims of, the act of photography. The paper thereby seeks to offer a history as complex and nuanced as the images it engages.

Geoffrey Batchen is Professor of History of Art at the University of Oxford. His next book will be titled On Silver Bright: Essays about Daguerreotypes.