'When you think about a culture that’s been handing things down in an unbroken narrative of art history for that long, and then people wanting to carry that on for another 65 000 years—it’s quite amazing. And you are just one of a million grains of sand in that history, but it’s important.'
The Darkness of Enlightenment is a series of daguerreotype photographs that highlight Australia’s complex colonial history. Daguerreotypes were the first publicly available photographic technology and used widely in the 1840s and 1850s. In utilising this process to depict his ancestral Kaurna Country, Tylor complicates the way in which colonists recorded and laid claim to these unceded lands. The alchemical process of creating direct-positive images is suggestive of the merging of fact and fiction that becomes the commonly accepted history.
‘I want people to understand that point of colonisation and how effective that was on Kaurna language, and what that feeling of loss and history and impact of colonisation has on the contemporary community, myself included. I also want them to feel it, to see it in a visual way and to be able to feel emotions about that, because it’s one thing to read this or be told this, it’s another thing to understand history, to feel history. Sometimes you just have to feel things to understand them.’
