James Tylor is a finalist in the 2023 William & Winifred Bowness Photography Prize with his work The Darkness of Enlightenment (Kauwayarlungga Myponga Beach 1).
'My work attempts to highlight the mistakes, mistranslations and loss of knowledge in the social documentation of Kaurna culture by European colonists.
I use the historical 19th-century photographic process of the Becquerel daguerreotype to create contemporary images that re-contextualise the representation of Australian society and history. Photography was historically used to document First Nations Peoples and the European colonisation of Australia.
The Darkness of Enlightenment starts as an idea. In this case, it’s the interaction between Kaurna and the colonists who had documented language on the frontier of South Australia. I’m predominantly a landscape photographer, so l use landscape to talk about that interaction, visiting places where that transaction of language happened and areas that were transmission points between the colonists and Kaurna.'
Artwork:
James Tylor
The Darkness of Enlightenment (Kauwayarlungga Myponga Beach 1), 2022
from the series The Darkness of Enlightenment II
Becquerel daguerreotype in Nantu Watpa grey kangaroo fur case
32.0 x 12.0 x 2.0
