Late 19th century photography worked in terms of the colonial or anthropological gaze that reminds us of the unequal power relations on the Australian frontier, as expressed in the way that indigenous peoples were reduced firstly to passive witnesses and finally to objects of curiosity.The anthropological casts a surveillant and voyeuristic gaze that silences the indigenous subject.

The faux studio constructions assembled by Lindt, with their artefact props and painted landscape backdrops are a feature of J.W. Lindt's Album of Australian Aboriginals, which were originally created during the early 1870s in his Grafton studio. Lindt's Album of Australian Aboriginals does appear to be prepared as an exercise in exoticism that constructs the indigenous subjects by a colonial vision.

The boundary lines between the colonized and the colonizers remain fairly rigid, whilst anthropology make photography its handmaiden or instrument.