Dr. Carol Payne
Associate Professor, Art History
An historian of photography, Dr. Payne’s expertise and research interests, related to indigenous cultures, revolve around how indigeneity is represented historically in photographs, how these images can be reimagined by communities today, and how contemporary artists and activists use the photograph as a form of cultural intervention.
Dr. Payne has recently been the Principal Investigator for a photo-based oral history project in collaboration with the Inuit training program Nunavut Sivuniksavut (NS), Library and Archives Canada’s Project Naming and Carleton University’s Geomatics and Cartographic Research Centre. NS students are hired as researchers to interview elders in their home communities across Nunavut about archival photographs depicting those same communities decades ago. This project was inspired by the question: “What if the ancestors of some of the people depicted in those images could tell their stories about them?”
Dr. Payne has learned from artists such as Jeff Thomas (Onondaga) and Rosalie Favell (Métis) as well as such scholars as Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis) that historic photographs made originally to support colonialist positions could be reimagined from indigenous perspectives and, indeed, become useful for indigenous communities.
Student Research
Key student research project throughout recent years has involved the Ottawa-based Inuit training program, Nunavut Sivuniksavut.
Taught 2013 graduate seminar on Aboriginal representation in the historic photographic archives of the Canadian Geological Society (housed at the Canadian Museum of History).
Recent publications and related urls
Views from the North cybercartographic atlas:
http://viewsfromthenorth.ca/index.html
Carol Payne, The Official Picture: The National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division and the Image of Canadian Nationhood (Montreal:McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2013). –especially Chapter 6 on Inuit reclamations of archival photographs.
Carol Payne, Sheena Ellison, Amos Hayes. Chapter 14: “Mapping Views from the North: Cybercartographic Technology and Inuit Photographic Encounters,” in Fraser Taylor, ed. Developments in the Theory and Practice of Cybercartography: Applications and Indigenous Mapping (Elsevior, 2013), 191-200.
Carol Payne and Andrea Kunard, eds. The Cultural Work of Photography in Canada.. ( Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, August 2011)—edited collection includes extensive discussion of indigenous photography including essays by Jeff Thomas (Onondaga) and Sherry Farrell Racette (Métis).
Carol Payne, “Through a Canadian Lens: Discourses of Nationalism and Aboriginal Representation in Governmental Photography,” in Jonathan Finn, ed. Visual Communication and Culture: Images in Action (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chapter 20.
Carol Payne, “‘You hear it in their voice’: Photographs and Cultural Consolidation among Inuit Youths and Elders,” in Image and Memory: Oral History and Photography. Alexander Freund and Alistair Thomson, eds. (London: Palgrave Press, 2011), 97-114.