Unfinished Business is a photographic oral-history project centred on thirty Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living with disability across Australia.

Each portrait is paired with the participant’s own account, and their disability is placed inside histories of colonisation, racism, institutionalisation, the Stolen Generations, environmental harm, inadequate services and the persistence to being heard on one’s own terms. The book strips that installation back to a stark sequence of black-and-white portraits and first-person narratives. The photographs are extraordinary. The sitters speak directly about deafness, blindness, illness, acquired disability, institutional violence, family, Country, survival and advocacy. It is both an art object and a social document, with the photographs functioning as a threshold into testimony rather than as illustrations of it.

Photographer and human-rights documentarian Belinda Mason developed the project over several years, with participants determining how their stories would be represented. The original exhibition combined large-scale lenticular portraits, video, voice and text, and was first shown at the Palais des Nations in Geneva in 2013 before appearing at the World Health Organization and as part of Australia’s contribution to the 2014 UN World Conference on Indigenous Peoples. 

Edition/Condition: Unfinished Business, 2014. Photography by Belinda Mason; edited by Sarah Shrubb; produced by Victoria Jefferys. Hardcover, 71 pp., extensively illustrated in black and white. ISBN 9780992320676. Light surface and shelf wear to boards; internally clean and firmly bound. Very good condition.