Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Nordeuropa-Institut

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät | Nordeuropa-Institut | TERMINE | WiSe 2018/19 | Henrik-Steffens-Vorlesungen Wintersemester 2018/19 | Indigenous Agency in Arctic Imagery: Photographs from Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa Expedition (1903-06) – Ingeborg Høvik

Indigenous Agency in Arctic Imagery: Photographs from Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa Expedition (1903-06) – Ingeborg Høvik

Ingeborg Høvik works at the University of Tromsø. Her talk deals with depictions of the indigenous in the context of Amundsens 1903-1906 expedition.
  • Indigenous Agency in Arctic Imagery: Photographs from Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa Expedition (1903-06) – Ingeborg Høvik
  • 2019-01-15T18:00:00+01:00
  • 2019-01-15T20:00:00+01:00
  • Ingeborg Høvik works at the University of Tromsø. Her talk deals with depictions of the indigenous in the context of Amundsens 1903-1906 expedition.
  • Was Öffentliche Veranstaltung Henrik-Steffens-Vorlesung
  • Wann 15.01.2019 von 18:00 bis 20:00
  • Wo DOR24, Raum 3.134 (Brandes)
  • iCal

Indigenous Agency in Arctic Imagery: Photographs from Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa Expedition (1903-06)

Ingeborg Høvik
 is associate professor at the University of Tromsø. Her research focuses on art and visual culture in Europe and North America, including postcolonial, eco-feminist and ecocritical theory, and indigenous methodology.
Der Vortrag wird auf Englisch gehalten.

In 1906 Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa expedition returned to Norway after three years in the Arctic and a successful navigation through the Northwest Passage. Back with them, the expedition brought a well of ethnographic material primarily collected from the Netsilik Inuit, a people with whom Amundsen’s crew had lived in close relation to over a sustained period of time during the explorers’ stay on King William Island in Nunavut between 1903 and 1905. Alongside this material were two thousand photographs, comprising glass plate negatives, film rolls and paper prints, which Godfred Hansen, the expedition’s photographer, had developed during the voyage. Of this vast body of visual material, Amundsen selected forty-two photographs for reproduction as illustrations in his ensuing account, Nordvest-passagen [the Northwest Passage], which was published in 1907.

 

My paper for the Henrik Steffens Lecture Series focuses on a selection of original and reproduced photographs from Roald Amundsen’s Gjøa expedition, and the relationship between these. I examine how the representation of indigenous people changed when certain photographs were selected, reproduced and re-contextualised in Amundsen’s account, Nordvest-passagen (1907). Bound up in ethnographic and visual conventions for the portrayal of indigenous people and connected ideas, this process involved a reduction of and temporal distancing from Inuit individuals. At the same time, the Netsilik Inuit seem to break out of the set frame of ethnographic objects. In taking advantage of photography’s inherent dialogical character, the portrayed Inuit changed ethnographic intention to various degrees of self-representation.