Melissa Miles

Evaluating interdisciplinary collaborative learning and assessment in the creative arts and humanities

This article responds to the rising emphasis placed on interdisciplinary collaborative learning and its implications for assessment in higher education. It presents findings from a research project that examined the effectiveness of an interdisciplinary collaborative student symposium as an assessment task in an art school/humanities environment. After addressing key ideas relating to interdisciplinarity, collaboration and assessment, the authors evaluate a practical model for facilitating interdisciplinary collaborative learning. Drawing on student surveys and assessment outcomes, the findings highlight the extent to which collaborative teaching and learning, coupled with social software tools and associated modes of communication, foster innovative, high quality interdisciplinary work, and offer an adaptable assessment framework for broader application in higher education settings.

The Drive to Archive: Conceptual Documentary Photobook Design

The term Conceptual Documentary has been used increasingly in recent years in response to certain shifts in documentary photography. By making sense of the world via an emphasis upon documentation, selection, editing and a cool, distanced and analytical aesthetic, Conceptual Documentary photography can be understood as a symptom of the archival impulse that pervades contemporary culture. This paper will address the particular implications of Conceptual Documentary photobooks as expressions of this archival impulse. With a focus on the books of the photographers Stephen Gill, Mathieu Pernot and Matthew Sleeth, it will assess the possibilities and limits of photobooks as alternative sites for the exhibition and reception of contemporary documentary photography.

Staging Japanese Femininity: Cross-cultural Dressing in Australian Photography

Abstract The popularity of Japanese inspired dress in portrait photographs of middle-class Australian women and girls during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries offers new insight into cross-cultural dressing and its links to identity. Rather than simply mirroring Orientalist fantasies of the distant and exotic East, these photographs indicate how Anglo-Australian women’s material cultural practices spoke to their own experiences of modernity and their impressions of Japanese femininity. Through their production and consumption of Japanese inspired fashion, musical theatre, decorative arts and travel photographs, these women were encouraged to respond to their admiration of Japanese femininity with their own embodied performances for the camera. Photographs of Australian women and girls in kimonos also illuminate the complexity of Australia’s cultural engagement with Japan in the era of the racially exclusive “White Australia” policy and Japanese imperialist incursions in the Asia-Pacific region. In staging their perceptions of Japanese femininity at home and in the photographer’s studio, Australian women also reconciled a series of conflicting ideals associated with dress reform, women’s suffrage and the “new woman.”

Photography, Privacy and the Public

There has been a recent shift in perceptions of photography and privacy in Australia. The view that our privacy is under threat has created an atmosphere of paranoia and fueled demands for law reform in relation to photography in public space. As photographers and privacy advocates battle each other by opposing the right to privacy with the right to free expression, there seems little chance of finding a workable solution. This article will consider this issue more deeply by analyzing the links between photography, privacy and the public, and assessing the cultural and political implications of this new climate.

Through Japanese eyes: Ichiro Kagiyama and Australian-Japanese relations in the 1920s and 1930s

The activities of a little known Japanese photographer working in Sydney, Australia during the early to mid twentieth century sheds new light on the photographic connections between Australia and Japan. The life and work of Ichirō Kagiyama are important catalysts for rethinking dualistic relationships between the ‘West’ and the ‘East’, and for developing an approach that allows for more nuance and complexity. Working directly with Australian photographers and tastemakers at a time when the so-called White Australia policy defined Australia as a racially exclusive country, Kagiyama challenges expectations about the historical relationships between Australia and Japan. Kagiyama’s work also illustrates the interrelationships between diverse forms of photography practice, from art and commercial photography to espionage, as well as close connections between the worlds of art, design, international trade and photography in 1920s and 1930s Sydney. As Kagiyama’s photographs resist essentialist readings yet were framed when published by stereotypes of Japanese culture as traditional, feminine and decorative, they help to tease out a certain tension within Australian–Japanese relations in the lead up to the Second World War.

Out of the Shadows: On Light, Darkness and Race in Australian Photography

Photographs of and by indigenous people in colonial countries have received considerable scholarly attention since the 1980s, but the role of colonisation in shaping the meaning of photography has been widely neglected. This article addresses this lacuna by focusing on metaphors of light, darkness and race, through which photography was made meaningful in colonial Australia. Representations of Aboriginality in photographs and in cartoons addressing photography are analysed to reveal how colonialist assumptions about race, light and darkness inform conceptions of Australian photography as process, brand and movement.

“The Child of the World’s Old Age”: Australian Perceptions of Japan-as-Child

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the important symbolic role of photographs of children in the context of developing diplomatic and trade relationships between Australia and Japan between the 1880s and 1920s. A fascinating series of studio, commercial and tourist photographs are examined, including commemorative postcards marking the Anglo-Japanese Alliance and hand-coloured lantern slides produced commercially in Japan. Building on political and military studies of Australian–Japanese relations, it explores the ways that Australian–Japanese relationships were mediated and reproduced through photography practices operating across private and public domains. In these photographs, children feature simultaneously as the face of Japan and an interface for political and cultural interpretation. As photographs of children helped to reinforce conflicting conceptions of Japan as a children’s paradise, a budding military power and an industrial threat, they offer insight into Australian anxieties about what modernity meant for the two Asia-Pacific nations.

Ichiro Kagiyama in Early Twentieth Century Sydney

ABSTRACT The recent discovery of a personal photograph album belonging to Ichiro Kagiyama offers new insight into this notable photographer’s work, biography and the Australian-Japanese community in Sydney in the 1910s. As a Japanese resident of Sydney from the early to mid-twentieth century, where he was an active member of the Photographic Society of New South Wales, a regular contributor to The Home magazine and a professional photographer operating his own commercial studio, Kagiyama made a valuable contribution to Australian visual culture. Regrettably very few examples of Kagiyama’s photographs are known to survive today. The rare personal album of 154 photographs examined here for the first time begins to address this paucity of material. This album presents images of important public moments of inter-cultural encounter between Australia and Japan, and reveals how Kagiyama used photography as an interpretive instrument to negotiate his own place amongst Anglo- and Japanese-Australian communities. The album also includes family photographs from Japan and hometown souvenirs, thus underscoring the mobility of photographs as material objects that can bridge the geographical and cultural distance between Australia and Japan.

A Career of Japan: Baron Raimund von Stillfried and Early Yokohama Photography, by Luke Gartlan

of people who accomplished extraordinary deeds for Japan’ in Shinron; and, he did not propose ‘to annually commemorate Kusunoki’s death’ in Soen wagon. All of this casts doubt on Takenaka’s grasp of ideas, events, persons, and sources linking Choshu, Mito, shokonsha, the Meiji Restoration, and Yasukuni. Elsewhere, she rightly notes the injustice behind enshrining Korean and Taiwanese colonials ‘forced to join the Japanese military’ (p. 134). But their conscription began in 1944; before that they volunteered to fight knowing that death would earn enshrinement. Bitter opposition by their bereaved kin today stems at least partly from postwar anti-colonial ethnic nationalism, often contrary to the wartime sentiments of those enshrined. Colonials, too, were duped by Yasukuni. Finally, Takenaka gets all dates wrong before 1873 when Japan adopted the Gregorian calendar; e. g., ‘Komei himself officiated [at] a shokon ritual ... on December 24, 1862’ (p. 33). The Komei emperor did not do this, and the date should be rendered either 12/24/ Bunkyu 2 or February 13, 1863. There was no month called ‘December’ in the old lunar calendar. It is far easier to fault a book than to write one, and we all make mistakes. I apologize if my sampling of Takenaka’s is excessive, misconstrued, or unfair; but accuracy of fact, fidelity to sources, and precision in exposition are not trivialities in history. Inattentiveness to them betrays our discipline by undermining its scholarly standards.

The Japanese Photographers of Broome: Photography and Cross-Cultural Encounter

The remote West Australian town of Broome has a unique photography heritage that sheds new light on the complexities of photography and intercultural relations. During the early twentieth century thriving Japanese communities were established in this region around the lucrative pearling industry. These Japanese communities also helped to develop a fascinating photography culture in Broome. Photography was not simply a business opportunity for the Japanese or a means of documenting people and events; it was a medium through which hierarchised social relations were produced, redefined, and challenged. This article examines photographs by these Japanese residents as an important site of cross-cultural communication and interpretation. These photographs of Anglo-Australian, Japanese, and Aboriginal residents of Broome enrich the study of cross-cultural photographic encounters, and emphasise the dynamic and dispersed qualities of Australian photographic practice and history. Here national histories of photography are usefully conceptualised as the products of imbricated social, economic, and cultural relations that operate across regional, national, and international realms.