Rodeo Baby!

“The artwork is centred upon the belief that it is our own bodies that are the truest archive of our experience and that any documentation is only ever an approximation of the person doing the gazing – not the gazed.”

While trawling archival video material, Jazz Money discovered an overwhelming amount of footage of First Peoples in rodeos. There was the joy of seeing Blak faces, but an unease in knowing non-Indigenous voyeurs likely captured the footage. In the vast network of archives in this country’s institutions, photos and videos of First Peoples are filed away, with the people who have been recorded – often unknowingly – and their descendants unaware the recordings exist.

Jazz reclaims these images, combining them with stills from film and TV, including The Phantom Stockman (1953), Radiance (1998) and The Drover’s Wife (2021), in this large-scale photographic essay. It celebrates First Peoples representation and the Aboriginal scholars who critique this colonial hoarding, giving new meaning to images that have been dislocated by archival practices. Jazz asks, “If these archival collections are the rodeo, who is playing cowboy with our images?”