Introduction/Preface: "My Post-colonial Gaze" Photomedia Artist Jo-Anne Duggan's Theorisation of Viewing Art

Abstract

Scholars have long engaged with interdisciplinarity within the Humanities, which is traced historiographically through developments in the traditional disciplines of Anthropology, Art History, History, Musicology, Linguistics, Literature and Sociology. A shift came over the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries from documenting political histories to rewriting the histories of everyday life through a socio-political lens. New social histories gained increasing momentum after World War II, but photographers had also been contributing to such critique after Joseph Nicéphore Niépce (1765-1833) paved the way for the invention of the camera through heliography in 1816, producing images from everyday life. The new discipline of Photography with a specialisation in photomedia entered universities and other higher-education institutions from the 1990s. This article introduces readers to Jo-Anne Duggan's theorisation of the "viewing experience" as well as four academic contributions inspired by Duggan's art practice and scholarship in this special edited collection.