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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2020
Journal of New Zealand & Pacific Studies - Photography in the Pacific Part 2, Dec 2020
Photography in the Pacific Part 2, Dec 2020
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Transcending the colonial gaze: Empathy, agency and community in the South Pacific photography of John Watt Beattie1
More LessFor three months in 1906, John Watt Beattie, the noted Australian photographer – at the invitation of the Anglican Bishop of Melanesia, Cecil Wilson – travelling on the church vessel the Southern Cross, photographed people and sites associated with the Melanesian Mission on Norfolk Island and present-day Vanuatu and Solomon Islands. Beattie reproduced many of the 1500-plus photographs from that trip, which he sold in various formats from his photographic studio in Hobart, Tasmania. The photographs constitute a priceless collection of Pacific images that began to be used very quickly in a variety of publications, with or without attribution. I shall examine some of these photographs in the context of the ethos of the Melanesian Mission, British colonialism in the Solomon Islands, and Beattie’s previous photographic experience. I shall argue that Beattie first exhibited a colonial gaze of objectifying his dehumanized exotic subjects (e.g. as ‘savages’ and ‘cannibals’) but with increased familiarity with them, became empathetic and admiring. In this change of attitude, I argue that he effectively transcended his colonial gaze to produce photographs of great empathy, beauty and longevity. At the same time, he became more critical of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific, whether government, commercial or church.
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Rev. John Burton frames the Fiji Methodist Mission, 1924
More LessIn his role as General Secretary of the Australasian Methodist Missionary Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Reverend John W. Burton travelled each winter to one of the ‘mission fields’ in the South Pacific to inspect the mission’s activities, and to encourage and advise. Accompanying him was his camera; Burton had long been an enthusiastic photographer. Following his 1924 visit to Fiji he created two albums of his photographs, one illustrating the indigenous Fijian mission, the other the Indian mission. This article focuses on the ‘social biography’ of the photographs, and examines Burton’s choice and balance of subjects in each album, which cover educational and other mission activities, village and town scenes, landscapes and individual and group portraits. It also considers the placement and message in context of many of the individual photographs when they were later reproduced to illustrate stories in the mission magazine, Missionary Review, of which Burton was the Editor.
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Wilhelm Knappe’s photo album as an early testimony of German colonization of the Marshall Islands1
More LessWilhelm Knappe (1855–1910), the first German administrator (imperial commissioner) assigned to the newly acquired Marshall Islands in 1886, created a photo album with pictures, presumably taken by New Zealand photographer Thomas Andrew in the same year. There are at least three existing copies of these albums and a bundle of loose photographs identical to those in the album in question. At the time of Knappe’s arrival in the Marshall Islands, Germany was still in the process of consolidating its newest colonial acquisition. The photographs show both Marshall Islanders untouched by Christian missions and colonial influence, and already ‘civilized’ Indigenous people from various atoll islands of the Ralik- and Ratak-group. The importance of this album results from the fact that it is one of the earliest pictorial records of the Marshall Islands and it probably represents the first documentation of German activities on the eastern Micronesian archipelago. This article highlights the history of the album and the photographs as well as their importance for a reconstruction of Marshall Islands’ history in the late nineteenth century.
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Early photographers encounter Tongans
More LessFour early photographers are examined here in relation to their encounters with Tongans and Tonga. These photographers are Andrew Garrett, Gustav Adolph Riemer, Clarence Gordon Campbell and Walter Stanhope Sherwill. Garrett, an American natural historian who specialized in shells and fish, took two ambrotypes of Tongans in Fiji in 1868, which are two of the earliest Tongan photographs known. Riemer, born in Saarlouis, Germany, was a marine photographer on S.M.S. Hertha on an official diplomatic visit and took at least 28 photographs in Tonga in 1876. Campbell, a tourist from New York, took 25 culturally important photographs in 1902. Sherwill, a British subject born in India, moved to Tonga about the time of the First World War. He probably took many photographs with more modern equipment, but only two have been identified with certainty. This article presents information about the photographers and those depicted, where the original photographs can be found and the research that made it possible to glean cultural information from them. These early photographers are placed in the context of other more well-known early photographers whose works can be found in archives and libraries in New Zealand, Australia, Hawai‘i and Germany. In addition, summary information about two Tongan-born photographers is presented, as well as where their photographs/negatives can be found.
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Early Māori photography as commodified object: Mementoes, miniatures and material culture
By Ian ConrichDuring the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a boom in the different forms of material culture of the photographic image with the emergence of cheap methods for its mass (re)production. The material culture extended into postcards, illustrated books, magic lantern slides and stereoviews, but also into the much-less discussed area of souvenir china. These commodified objects of illustrated porcelain were popular mementoes of places visited, physical reminders of spaces encountered, made possible through newly developing modes of leisure culture and organized travel. Edwardian New Zealand was no exception, where images of the Māori were a striking presence within its visual culture. This was a country that was beginning to promote its cultural uniqueness partly through its Indigenous population, with early tourism literature referring to the country as Maoriland. New Zealand souvenirs depicted images of the Māori and Māoritanga (Māori culture) on decorative china essentially for consumption by local tourists and travellers. This article considers these commodified objects in the context of photography as material culture, exploring their social biography and the manner in which the images were reproduced and altered. It contends that in addressing keepsake china as objects bearing photographic images, and in positioning these souvenirs as popular artefacts within a scopic culture, a more complex argument of variant readings emerges.
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Out of the box, onto the web: Digitizing images in the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology
Authors: Cristela Garcia-Spitz and Kathryn CreelyHow are ethnographic photographs from the twentieth century accessed and represented in the twenty-first century? This report from the Tuzin Archive for Melanesian Anthropology at the University of California San Diego Library provides an overview of the photographic materials, arrangements and types of documentation in the archive, followed by summaries of specific digitization projects of the photographs from physician Sylvester Lambert and anthropologists Roger Keesing and Harold Scheffler, among others. Through the process of digitization and online access, ethnographic photographs are transformed and may be discovered and contextualized in new ways. Utilizing new technologies and forming broad collaborations, these digitization projects incorporate both anthropological and archival practices and also raise ethical questions. This is an in-depth look at what is digitized and how it is described to re/create meaning and context and to bring new life to these images.
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Researching early photography of the Pacific Islands: An overview
By Max QuanchiHistorical research on the early years of photography in the Pacific Islands has revealed changes in the practice of photography, the development of Pacific imagery, tropes and stereotypes and changes in the ways images were distributed, archived and used in modern contexts. Research in the field was initially focused on photography’s indexical nature and the role of professional and amateur photographers, travellers, colonial officials and missionaries. The research highlighted here, only in the English language and excluding Aotearoa/New Zealand, reveals how later analyses have begun to grow more theoretical, in keeping with postcolonial approaches to reading cross-cultural representation, and how new directions in research point towards the nature of Indigenous engagement with early photography.
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My father’s Pitcairn
More LessThis examination of personal correspondence reveals not only how material exchanges were established between a small Pacific island and a burgeoning superpower, but also how a discourse network developed to support a friendly, informative relationship over 35 years. In 1958, my father, Spencer Scheckter, in New Jersey, United States, began a correspondence with John and Bernice Christian, on Pitcairn Island, that lasted until Bernice died in 1993. As the manager of a small-town department store, my father asked practical questions and solved logistical problems. A small trade developed: Spencer sent clothing and machine parts, and the Christians returned wood carvings and other souvenirs. The discourse network revealed in the material exchange rarely permits emotional depth or complexity, so that its shape is readily apparent – and its boundaries as well. On Pitcairn, the time period of the correspondence will later come under legal scrutiny, beginning in 1997, with allegations of rape and sexual abuse that eventually came to trial in 2004. While the investigations implicated the entire culture of the island, the Christians’ bounded discourse offers, perhaps more usefully, a clear picture of the complicated, interwoven negotiations that ageing individuals were required to perform in a small, closed society.
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Te Ao Tawhito: The Old World 3000 bc–ad 1830, Atholl Anderson (2018)
Authors: Nicholas Jones, Charlotte Muru-Lanning and Marama Muru-LanningReview of: Te Ao Tawhito: The Old World 3000 bc–ad 1830, Atholl Anderson (2018)
Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 216 pp.,
ISBN 978 1 98853 335 3 (pbk), NZ$59.99
Te Ao Hou: The New World 1820–1920, Judith Binney, Vincent O’Malley and Alan Ward (2018)
Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 200 pp.,
ISBN 978 1 98853 340 7 (pbk), NZ$59.99
Te Ao Hurihuri: The Changing World 1920–2014, Aroha Harris with Melissa Matutina Williams (2018)
Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 176 pp.,
ISBN 978 1 98853 345 2 (pbk), NZ$59.99
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