Picture This

A popular idiom is that a picture paints a thousand words. In the case of this black-and-white happy snap, a thousand stories could be told. To the unaware viewer a group of people—also black-and-white—stand smiling, one awkwardly, in front of an obscured portrait of a young woman in a white-walled room. Clothing and hairstyles indicate the timeframe as mid-1990s and there is a familiarity of many of the faces captured.

When this photograph appeared on my screen, I was transported back at The Performance Space, then located in Sydney’s First Nations heartland, Redfern. The exhibition was a collaborative project between Boomalli Aboriginal Artists Co-operative (founded by Sydney-based First Nations artists in 1987) and Black British curator and critic Eddie Chambers. The collaborative project was created for INIVA (Institute for International Visual Arts), which was established by renowned cultural theorist Stuart Hall in 1993–94 in the United Kingdom.