A Museum 3.0 Exhibition Example – “Decolonizing” a colonialist photo, Part 2

In my earlier “Decolonizing a photo of Mr and Mrs Gibson” post, I found a public domain photo from the Vancouver archives, that is said to show Mr and Mrs Gibson, the “founders” of their namesake town of Gibsons, standing in front of their homestead house. I removed the colonizers, and rechristened the photo as “Wild cat in front of a home in Gibsons”.

The original “Mr and Mrs George William Gibson in front of their home” public domain photo.

… thus became…

“Wild cat in front of a home in Gibsons”

At the end of this initial decolonizing a photo post, I suggested I will do a second stage revision, where the tools and their house are in ruins, as if the homestead has been abandoned. Instead, this evening I decided to go further with the image, and remove all evidence of the Gibsons presence, by restoring some mature cedars on the site of their house.

So “Wild cat in front of a home in Gibsons” becomes…

“Wild cat in forest – at the scene of the Great Flood”

(According to the Gibsons wikipedia posting, the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh oral history tells that the region around Gibsons was the birthplace of the Squamish people after what is called The Great Flood.)

Now I feel like the image is more credibly “decolonized”.

Note – the original source image and this digital erasure work has been done at a decent resolution. I have radically reduced the dimensions and added heavy compression to these images. If anyone would like to see the full resolution versions, drop me an email, I am happy to send them on to you.