Photography’s long shadow: Ekphrasis and Maori literature

Abstract

This article explores how Indigenous novelists use ekphrastic engagements with photography and painting to undermine the status of ethnographic images that show their culture as fixed on paper and unchanging in white-authored books. Paula Morris’s Rangatira (2011) and Kelly Ana Morey’s Bloom (2003), two novels by Aotearoa/New Zealand Maori women writers that raise doubt about the representative ability of the photograph to reflect the “truth” of a person or a culture, are the starting point of a reflection on the dual role of photography, and especially portraiture, to express fixity and permanence (we always are) as well as flux and movement (we are changing). The images described in the narratives are textual artefacts, and it is argued that the author’s ekphrastic relationship with them aims at uncovering “real” identity through self-representation and the rejection of outside representations. It is suggested that, while photographs of Maori subjects by European photographers create erroneous representations which contemporary Maori authors seek to correct, photographs of Maori subjects by Maori photographers destabilize established representations and highlight photography’s failure to capture their “real” essence as well as its potential to express the instability of identity constructs.

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