Enzo Hamel – Current research on Gregory Bateson’s PNG photographic archives

LECTURE

Recovering Indigenous agencies in ethnographic visual archives: Gregory Bateson’s photographs in the Iatmul region.

We are excited to announce that Enzo Hamel is presenting the first OAS Lecture for 2024 in April. Enzo is a PhD-funded student at the Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania and the Americas at the University of East Anglia, in Norwich (UK) and is also a funded scholar at the Stuart Hall Foundation. He is a graduate in both Art History from the Ecole du Louvre, Paris and Social Anthropology at the Université of Paris-Nanterre.

Enzo’s research focuses mainly on visual archives and the intertwined colonial history of anthropology and photography. In this lecture, he will discuss his current research project on the visual archives deriving from the fieldwork of the anthropologist Gregory Bateson in the East Sepik Province in Papua New Guinea between 1929 and 1938. These visual archives remain largely ignored but have the potential to shed new light on Indigenous agencies in colonial photographic archives by interrogating the photographic act in which photographed subjects are seen but silenced, thereby recovering the historical and relational contexts of these photographic encounters.

Through these photographic archives, it is possible to have a more detailed and nuanced understanding of everyday life in the field and the relationships at stake.

Please arrive at 6.00pm for a 6.30pm start at the Cooee ART Leven Gallery, 17 Thurlow Street Redfern, New South Wales 2016. Gallery website: www.cooeeart.com.au

The lecture will be followed by an optional dinner at own cost from 8pm at ‘Sumac and Onion’, 684 Bourke Street, Redfern. www.sumacandonion.com

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