• After making prints, he returned to Central Australia to work with artists and other members of those same communities at the Warlukurlangu Art Centre, so they could restrict and amend his photographs through the process of painting.
    The Restricted Images series is a collaboration between Waterhouse and the Warlukurlangu Art Centre. The works were made in the communities of Yuendumu and Nyirripi which are remote desert aboriginal communities in Central Australia. 
     
    The publication in 1899 of The Native Tribes of Central Australia caused a sensation in Europe. The book’s authors, telegraph-station master Francis J. Gillen and ethnologist W. Baldwin Spencer, had written in depth about the customs and traditions of the Aboriginal groups living near Alice Springs and also illustrated their texts with 119 photographs, many of which captured rituals and ceremonies. While the subject, quality and quantity of the images set a new standard for anthropological photography, the authors were largely oblivious to the impact they would have on the lives of the Aboriginals. The pictures revealed the gap in knowledge between the authors, whose goal was showing the exotic natives “in their natural state”, and the subjects, who were completely unaware of the new medium and how it could invade their privacy or reveal their secrets to a wider audience. Unwittingly or not, the authors also infringed upon Aboriginal cultural protocols by showing sacred sites and the dead.
     
    Attitudes have changed since Gillen and Baldwin Spencer first ventured in the Central Desert with a camera and institutions have taken extensive measures to ensure that cultural sensitivity is respected. Today, photography within Aboriginal communities is limited and historical images are often “restricted”. Over the past years, Patrick Waterhouse has taken photographs in the Yeundumu and Nyirrpi Aboriginal communities, and in the surrounding Warlpiri country. After making prints, he returned to Central Australia to work with artists and other members of those same communities at the Warlukurlangu Art Centre, so they could restrict and amend his photographs through the process of painting.
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  • Patrick Waterhouse (b. 1981, UK) is an artist who explores the shifting nature of our understanding of the past. Through...
    Patrick Waterhouse (b. 1981, UK) is an artist who explores the shifting nature of our understanding of the past. Through processes that play with narrative representation, his work sheds light on the construction of history and its origins.
    In 2008, Waterhouse began work on his renowned series Ponte City, made in collaboration with Mikhael Subotzky, in which the pair investigated the fifty-four storey cylindrical apartment building that towers over Johannesburg. Over six years they probed the varying perspectives of this icon – from its architecture to its urban legends – revealing new and alternative accounts of the building’s history.
     
    Collaboration is integral to Waterhouse’s practice, informing and shaping the trajectory of his projects as the work forms through conversation and engagement with those represented and the communities in which they live. In the making of Restricted Images, Waterhouse lived and worked with the Warlpiri communities of Yuendumu and Nyirripi over a five-year period, taking photographs and then inviting community members to restrict their images using traditional dot painting.