Bitter Fruit

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are warned that this book may contain images of people who are deceased.

Bitter Fruit is a brand new title from Michael Graham-Stewart, showcasing a collection of early photographs, many previously unpublished, focusing on Indigenous Australians. Presented in a beautiful hardcover, this is a breathtaking document of the Australian experience.

The photographs reproduced in this book were collected over the past decade or so. During this time, online archives have grown in number and size, raising questions about what should be made available to the general public, and who should decide. At the same time, it has become easier to find information about the people who took the photographs, the places they were taken, and, most importantly, the individuals depicted.

If this book has a purpose, it is to offer a sequence other than the familiar one, to broaden and to texture our sense of the histories of the place we know today as Australia. In these photographs, we can find evidence of wrongdoing and suffering, but also of resistance, adaptation, and continuity. Then, too, the images frequently reveal the agency of their 'subjects' - a force that can transcend the problems associated with the moment of making.