Negotiating nostalgia, folding photographs: A practice-led critical examination of whiteness, as a politics of belonging.

Abstract

Post-WWII emigration saw over 1.6 million British citizens leave for so-called-Australia, seven of my grandfather’s siblings included. Childhood visits from overseas family were instrumental in producing and reproducing real and imaginative encounters with Australian-ness for me. This article examines folding, as part of a photographic methodology that critically explores whiteness as part of a sense of belonging, I carry, rooted within these experiences. Whiteness is considered a form of imperial violence and is explored as an affective atmosphere of what Ann Laura Stoler (2016) calls imperial duress: a racialised encounter with the excesses or debris of imperialism. My practice addresses the complexities of understanding post-imperial spaces. Photography, like whiteness, is bound with imperialism and has long prioritised representational ideologies: concepts of truth, reality and the exact. Folding operates in opposition to these. Using non-representational theories to support folding as an affective methodology, I discuss the possibilities of returning to and unfixing photographic practices that perpetuate imperial violence. Folding becomes a method for unlearning whiteness through negotiating its affective qualities. This practice problematises cultural legacies of British colonialism in so-called-Australia, which remain unsettled and unresolved, highlighting that creativity might help us critically evaluate and expand understandings of coloniality.