Listening to Landscapes: Sonal Kantaria on Photographing Western Australia

Sonal Kantaria has been photographing the Western Australian landscape, its inhabitants and their oral histories since 2013. Kantaria’s doctoral research stemmed from looking at the Indian diaspora in Australia and subsequently shifted its focus to working with Aboriginal elders. Currently pursuing her doctoral degree at King’s College, London, with the support of the Menzies Australia Institute, Kantaria’s research is centred on the vast yet sparsely inhabited landscape of Western Australia along with the stories of its people.

Over the past decade, during the making of On Country, the artist spent several months at a stretch with elders of the Noongar community. She began by learning about their culture, listening to the way they read the lay of the land and understanding their respect and care for nature. Their method of reading the land informed Kantaria’s documentation of the landscape. 

In this interview, Kantaria talks about one of her first encounters on the landscape, with a fox and a snake. The dialogue between the fox—introduced to the Australian ecosystem during the colonial period—with one of Australia’s deadliest indigenous reptiles, the snake, highlights the artist’s larger concerns around colonial remnants that continue to damage even the natural world. Kantaria’s research on pre-colonial and post-colonial relationships that exist in communities, belonging and land are further explored through landscapes, as detailed by her in this conversation.

While the works in this series depict people from Australia’s Aboriginal communities, they are depicted with permission, care and precaution—so as to maintain their belief in not capturing a soul in a still image. The passage of time is a crucial element in Kantaria’s work as the slowness of time finds its way into the artist’s development of the project through Super 8 films and moving photographs. Her exploration of the form invites viewers to pause and notice the constant change in nature that only close observation tends to reflect.

^{(Featured image: Sonal Kantaria, Murchison region, Western Australia, 2014.)}

 

Conversation recorded on 03 November 2021.

To read more about visual projects documenting communities, ecology and landscape, click here, here and here.

Images in order of appearance: Murchison region, Western Australia, 2014; Dying Fox, 2013; Snake, 2013; Dead Fox, 2013. All images by Sonal Kantaria, courtesy of the artist.