Surat: Atong Atem

Commissioned by Photo Australia for PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography, Surat (which translates from Sudanese Arabic as ‘snapshots’) is an homage to family photos and the characters that make up a family. Atem revisited her family photo albums that span decades and continents, and restaged and reimagined scenes and characters. The resulting book is a documentation of a series of performances as self portraits and the act of photographing and being photographed, framing and being framed. It’s a performative depiction of photography and the repetition of dressing, sitting, posing, changing, testing, adjusting and capturing.

Surat is a celebration of the visual language of family photographs and photography as an extension of our oral traditions. “We sing songs to tell history and we dress up and sit for photographs to mythologise our histories.”This work honours the Dinka tradition of record keeping and archiving as a cultural and intimate practice.

For Atem, the book is also about movement, both geographic and historic. “It’s about South Sudan, so-called Australia and everywhere else in between that I’ve rested my head to dream about my people—or rather the depictions of people I don’t know but am connected to through photographs.”