Photographs and Foundations: Visualizing the past on Atchin and Vao

The majority of anthropological literature around photography of Indigenous peoples has privileged the actions, agency, and intent of the Western photographer. While one cannot ignore the significant colonizing influences that photographs have had on Indigenous peoples, one cannot presume that these individuals were solely the silenced subject or victim in a one-sided, inferior relationship with the camera and its operator. Recent scholarship is now re-examining the relationship Indigenous peoples have had with photography as a culturally productive technology since its development. In this article, I will address the role of photography in a global context as an object and a method of decolonization in two ways: (a) through archived collections of colonial photography and (b) in the production of contemporary photographs by peoples who experience contemporary colonialism. In both of these contexts, I will explore how various populations or communities with a colonial history use photography to confront ongoing legacies of colonialism, particularly in agendas aimed at repairing and reconfiguring relationships with self, family and kin, colonizer, community, and the natural world. Drawing on examples from several countries and locales, I will address the potentials and challenges of reframing Indigenous peoples’ experience of, and relationship with, photography within the context of de-colonial praxis.

The encounter with portrait photography in colonial Ceylon presents a rare amalgam of identity, culture and occupation in the history of the sub-continent. A synthesis of 'community and status' or 'community and habitat' finds a striking pictorial foothold in the island and the photographic repertoire in this essay will attempt to showcase such encounters through the studio photographs of both the elite and the local populace. It will also present the concurrent preoccupation with plantation photography and correlated images of a choreographed display of mass labour. The subdued but arresting shots of natives at work and within the domestic realm, in addition, finds a place in this collection. They offer a glimpse into life on the island in the late 19th century, capturing themes related to bourgeoisie assertion/consciousness, religious revivalism and civilian life. In so doing, this analysis shall offer some insights into the intercourse between as the historian Sujit Sivasundaram calls it 'cosmopolitanism and ingenuity', marking the island's separate identity from the Indian mainland. Though ethnographic portraiture on the island skirted anthropometric vision unlike colonial India, it did categorise islanders and their occupations.

Journal of Aesthetics & Culture

Returning old photographs to Sámi communities has been a part of modern repatriation policies, trying to recollect the Sámi heritage from museums, archives and collections outside the modern Sámi area. It is not only important to return items, such as photographs, but also to reconstruct the knowledge around them: to re-identify the old encounters and stories. The article suggests that the earlier interpretations have emphasised the inter-ethnic relations between the Sámi and the majority societies. When returned to local levels of Sámi communities, however, to be interpreted through the lenses of the Sámi subjects, the photographs tell multiple visualized stories about intra-ethnic "our histories", the recent past of families, kinships and small Sámi communities. The article is based on my experiences and the projects that have been carried out in Finland in the past 15 years, repatriating photographs to Sámi societies.

The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters, 2018

Resumen El capítulo describe el análisis de más de mil fotografías tomadas en Isla de Pascua (Rapa Nui) entre los años 1886 y 1925. Buscamos entender más allá de la mera descricpción de estas fotografías, el contexto en el cual éstas que fueron tomadas. Se persigue desentrañar el discurso oculto de los autores que están detrás de éstas imágenes. Las fotografías fueron ordenadas de acuerdo a categorías y variables predefinidas como fotografías de paisajes vs fotografías de personas ya sea en retratos individuales o fotografías grupales. En el primer grupo encontramos que los moai son los elementos más representado en todos los tiempos, que llamaron poderosamente la atención de todos los visitantes a la isla. En cuanto a las fotografías de personas resaltan aquellas montadas en espacios bien pensados, e imbuidas de un fuerte discurso colonial. Summary The chapter describes the analysis of a corpus of over a thousand photographs taken on Easter Island (Rapa Nui) between 1886 and 1925. We seek to understand these photographs within the context in which these were taken. We attempt an analysis of the unseen, unraveling the unspoken discourse behind these images. The photographs were classified according to criteria of cultural vs natural landscapes, and individual or group portraits of people. We found that the moai are the most represented element of the Rapanui landscape, as these megalithic statues have drawn the attention of all visitors to the island in all times. Among the photographs of people – both portraits and group images – we observe that the images are often carefully planned and sometimes staged and imbued with a strong colonial discourse.

NZSA conference, 2023

Early photography from colonies and places regarded as exotic was to various extents influenced by contemporary anthropology. This influence was both indirect, where photographers of all backgrounds had picked up anthropologically inspired imagery in publications and elsewhere before their travels, and it was direct where anthropologists visited and photographed themselves and met with others equipped with cameras. I here examine how this interest and attention from the developing discipline of ethnography/ anthropology influenced photography in PNG from the earliest photographs taken till 1940. How did it affect the photographs taken by explorers, missionaries, administrators, planters, traders and professional photographers, which make up the largest part of the PNG photographic archive? And how did anthropological fieldworkers themselves contribute to the full scope of early PNG photography. The large archive of historical photographs from Papua New Guinea (PNG), spread on numerous archives in Europe, Australia, the US and in PNG, stands out in several ways when compared with other colonies. This is partly due to New Guinea’s relatively late colonisation, partly to the small European communities in the New Guinea colonies, and partly to the exceptional diversity of cultural expressions that the Europeans met with. Both the British and German New Guinea colonies furthermore received particular ethnographic attention from scholarly institutions and from museums, materialising in influential theoretical works and vast material collections. Some of the most well-known scholars in the field, such as Haddon, Seligman, Malinowski, Mead and Bateson, did fieldwork in PNG and all contributed greatly to the photographic representation of the people and local culture and traditions. And they met and stayed with other keen photographers with whom they shared prints and influences.