Adjusting the Lens

Adjusting the Lens explores and celebrates decolonizing strategies and practices that confront the ways the photographic record of Indigenous peoples has been shaped by the colonial imagination.

Adjusting the Lens explores and celebrates decolonizing strategies and practices that confront the ways the photographic record of Indigenous peoples has been shaped by the colonial imagination.

Sigrid Lien is a professor of art history at the University of Bergen, Norway. She is the author of Pictures of Longing: Photography and the Norwegian-American Migration and coeditor, with Justin Carville, of Contact Zones: Photography, Migration, and Cultural Encounters in the United States, among other works. She was also Norwegian team leader for the projects Photographs, Colonial Legacy, and Museums in Contemporary European Culture (PhotoCLEC, 2010–12), and Negotiating History: Photography in Sámi Culture (2014–17). Hilde Wallem Nielssen is a professor of intercultural studies at NLA University College, Bergen, Norway. Among her publications is Ritual Imagination: A Study of Tromba Possession among the Betsimisaraka in Eastern Madagascar and, with Sigrid Lien, Museumsforteljingar. Vi og dei andre i kulturhistoriske museum (Museum Stories: We and the Others in Cultural History Exhibitions). Her work encompasses rituals and religious movements, missionary ethnography, museum exhibitions, and photography, in particular photographs from Sámi areas.

Contributors: Elizabeth Edwards, Beth Greenhor, Ingeborg Høvik, Piita Irniq, Laura Junka-Aikio, Veli-Pekka Lehtola, Jane Lydon, Donna Oxenham, Carol Payne, Laura Peers, Mette Sandbye, Hanne Hammer Stien, waaseyaa'sin Christine Sy, Manitok Thompson, Deborah Kigjugalik Webster, Sally Kate Webster, Carol Williams, Christina Williamson

Charlotte Townsend-Gault, professor emerita, Department of Art History, Visual Art and Theory, University of British Columbia, and honorary professor, social anthropology, University College London:

This collection is a model of trans-cultural scholarly cooperation. It advances the debate in serious, not just feel-good or conciliatory, ways.

Amy Lonetree, associate professor of history, University of California, Santa Cruz:

Adjusting the Lens is a cutting-edge and timely study of Indigenous photography, and is a pleasure to read from beginning to end. Everyone interested in the use and circulation of Indigenous images, along with contemporary engagements with photographic collections by descendant communities, will find this groundbreaking and powerful collection incredibly useful.

John Heaton, professor of history, University of Alaska:

It is the mark of good scholarship to challenge readers to pause and think deeply about the positions they hold and to engage in alternative ways of thinking and understanding. This powerful book does just that.