I have two of everything (Surat) by Atong Atem

Atong Atem Reimagines Family Photos To Explore Her South Sudanese Heritage

“I'm representative of nothing. The only thing I'm representing is myself and my awareness of the world.”

April 20, 2022, 5:15am

For the last few years, the family portrait has been central to Melbourne photographer Atong Atem’s work. But unlike the cumbersome and forcefully posed photos commanded by parents (usually featuring an entire family rocking 90s bowl cuts), Atem’s photos hold a deeper significance. Truth, history and personal narrative are all themes she has become renowned for - and they all take centre-stage in her new photo book, Surat. A work that will be showing at PHOTO 2022 International Festival of Photography and commissioned by Photo Australia.

“There's a tradition of photography as a really empowering and important tool,” Atem told VICE.

“This work for me was about celebrating my own relationship to photography. And the foundation of my arts practice is through family photos and the way that we use it as a form of documenting.”

“My parents grabbed photos when they had to flee the war in Sudan. They were a tool for documenting our lives.”

The family photos behind Atong Atem's inspiration

Though Atem’s work broadly circles the narrative of the African diaspora, postcolonial practices and migrant narratives, her photos are highly intimate, relying instead on her own subjective truth rather than factual historical retellings.

“There is no such thing as universal truth,” said Atem.

“I just feel like there's so much mythology created in photography. I decided to create my own mythology with these self portraits. I invented mythological representations of people in my family as a way to speak to the importance of photography.”

For Atem, historical photography has long been used to establish ideas of control and to create narratives that fit pre-existing ideas of what it means to be human.

Running in line with her previous works which emphasise the colourful nature of her heritage– her signature being matte paint and pearls adorning the faces of her models – Surat continues on a trajectory to present the nostalgic nature of family portraiture. They’re stylised, moving away from uber-traditional concepts and focusing mainly on paying homage to long held traditions.

She points to a photo of her mother as a favourite.

'Mama' from Surat (2022) alongside a portrait of Atem's mother

“This is a photo of my mum from one of those family shoots in the 90s. She’s wearing her best dress, has make-up on and gorgeous earrings. And there’s a little tissue in her hand,” said Atem.

“It symbolises beauty and the ideal feminine aesthetic, yet the tissue depicts her still being a mother, which is culturally important.”

“I wanted to imitate that in my own way. In my version I wear an Ethiopian dress that I got in South Sudan in 2011, which is the year that it became an independent nation. So it has these personal, intricate references.”

Though audiences might seek meaning from her work, at times painting her photos as objective retellings of Sudanese history, for Atong it comes back to the truth of her own experiences.

“I think most evidently with other South Sudanese they immediately see these family photos that I'm referencing, and it's sort of assumed knowledge that they already have,” she said.“ Whereas a lot of people that aren’t South Sudanese - or who don't have that history of family photography - may see it differently.”

“I'm representative of nothing, the only thing I'm representing is myself and my awareness of the world.”