Aboriginal superheroes wow at the world’s top photography festival

The city of Arles in the south of France is famed for its Roman antiquity, with its monumental amphitheatre, built in 90AD, and nearby aqueducts. Right now, however, the city has been taken over by an even more ancient – and distant – civilisation.

On posters and placemats in cafés, on banners strung across cobbled streets and on three-metre-high billboards is an image of an Indigenous boy dressed as a caped crusader brandishing a makeshift shield painted in Australian First Nations colours. Feet perched on the rusting carapace of an abandoned car, his bright red mask flaunts a yellow ‘A’: a riff off the Marvel character Captain America, subverted to suggest Captain Aboriginal.

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