There is currently a growing worldwide interest in the Northern and Arctic areas in relation to natural resources, ecology and climate change. But the attention has also been directed towards the question of indigenous rights and the matter of preserving their culture. In June 2017, the National Assembly in Norway sanctioned the establishment of a Truth Commission in order to shed light on a difficult past, involving the oppression and injustices committed towards the Sámi and Kven populations. At the same time Sámi contemporary art attracts wide attention on important international arenas such as Documenta in Athens and Kassel.
Negotiating the past is an integral part of ongoing political and cultural processes. Photography is in an important entrance to the past as well as the present. Hardly any cultural form has been more important than photography in the ways Sámi people have been perceived. This special issue of Journal of Aesthetics and Culture explores past and contemporary photography practices connected to the Sámi areas or Sápmi. It raises the following questions: What does the photographic legacy contain? How has it been formed and used? How have tensions between indigenous local agency and the gaze of dominant others been addressed both historically and in the contemporary society?
Much of the photographic legacy related to Sápmi is coloured by the ways in which Europeans imagined the Sámi. In this sense it forms part of a Nordic-European colonial visual culture and perceptual regime, and as such largely conforms to understandings of racial difference, ideas of cultural evolution, and the various agendas of the civilizing missions. The photographs manifest projects ranging from the development of racial typologies to ethnographic classification; they were tools of administrative control and surveillance; they formed part of arctic explorations and Christian missionizing and civilizing projects like education, health and hygiene; and they were distributed in the Western marked as exotica.
The contributions to this special issue all address different perspectives related to historical and present uses of photography. Sigrid Lien discusses the nineteenth century photographic practices of scientific explorers travelling to the North, with a focus on the images from Sophus Tromholt and Roland Bonaparte’s expeditions in 1883 and 1884. The rather limited existing literature about these photographs is divided in two directions. One points to contemporary artistic reengagements as repatriation of visual heritage, while the other strives to articulate the various degrees of objectification of the Sámi sitters (individuality or typology). However, Lien argues that the photographs in question not only reflect the asymmetries between the photographer and the sitters. Situated in a larger visual economy of exploration, they also appear as identity performances of the academic male subjects who produced them—who made use of photography in order to salvage the scientific credibility of their respective projects.
Bonaparte’s journey was only one of many expeditions to the North with the purpose of racial research. Hilde Wallem Nielssen’s article discusses how photographs of the Sámi people were used in the context of Norwegian physical anthropology in the interwar period. She argues that photography increased its value to racial research at a moment when the science was simultaneously at its peak, and on the verge of collapse. Photographs maintained their significance to racial research, but not as biometrical instruments. They provided visual imaginary “evidence” of racial specificities where the scientific practices otherwise failed. However, these images that epitomize the experiences of oppression and abuse of the Sámi population, are today renegotiated and recirculated in Sámi communities.
Such processes of reengagement are brought to the forefront in Veli-Pekka Lehtola’s contribution. Focusing on the photographic material in Sápmi and Finland, Lehtola states that this photographic heritage not only serves as testimonies of past events or cultural encounters. From a Sámi perspective the photographs tell multiple stories about their own past on their own terms: about families, kinships, and community. Photographs, Lehtola holds, also serve as emotional archives that transfer past experiences and memories. Arguing against the conventional historiography that defines or discusses Sáminess, always in relation to the majority society, Lehtola argues for the necessity of exploring the Sámi “us”—the Sámi world on its own terms.
Finally, Laura Junka-Aikio shows how contemporary Sámi artists make use of global visual archives to contest and renew representations of the Sámi. She brings the attention to the political dimensions of such processes through her study of the activities of the anonymous Sámi artist group Suohpanterror. In their online poster production, historic and recent photographs are incorporated into what Junka-Aikio conceptualizes as indigenous culture jamming and decolonial art. Humour and laughter are essential to Suohpanterror’s aesthetic profile. Accordingly, Junka-Aikio points to the way their art constitutes a kind of online intimacy, as well as a sense of political resonance between those who know and who laugh together.
Together these four contributions offer an entrance into a new and emerging field of research. The Sámi population is probably among the most photographed in Europe. Today major institutions hold large collections of photographs from Sámi areas, not only in the Nordic countries, but also in for example Great Britain, Germany and France. While Sámi culture and history are emerging fields of research, the studies conducted so far have not paid much attention to photography. The articles in this issue all discuss photography in relation to a difficult past, but they also speak about the ongoing negotiations that on different levels are taking place in the present. Lastly, they address important questions of how power structures are accommodated, resisted, appropriated and transformed into something new.