Objects/Histories. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2013. xv, 221 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$27.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5510-6.
Christopher Wright’s perceptive contribution to the Objects/Histories Series argues for an ethnographic approach to understanding photography. He looks at the uses of photographs in Roviana Lagoon in the Solomon Islands and examines the ways in which the people of Roviana are entangled with photography: as once colonial subjects, as producers and consumers of photography, and also Roviana perceptions of the past, present, memory and history.
Wright questions the normative value of Euro-American photography and seeks to provincialize those dominant models through an ethnography of Roviana photographic practices. Underpinning Wright’s approach is a perception of photography as socially activated which draws not only on Bourdieu’s notion of the “sociogram” but also Elizabeth Edwards’ concept of the photograph as an oral history. Wright does a thorough synthesis of many contemporary and historical commentators on photography, from John Tagg and Victor Burgin to Allan Sekula, Peter Galassi, Christopher Pinney, Barthe and Batchen, among others, drawing on a wide terrain of photographic interests. In doing so Wright has brought together an interesting field of analysis for future scholars of photography in the Pacific. He reflects on the way photography shares a parallel history with anthropology and argues for a wider focus that is inclusive of other photographic traditions alongside an understanding of photography as a medium. Photography, he believes, is not a neutral tool but is productive of many kinds of selves, imaginaries and networks and he traces the history of white colonial engagement in Roviana as well as that of the Methodist Church with the use of archival images. By focusing on what the early photographic encounters reveal about both the colonialists and the Roviana people, Wright here and elsewhere in the book gives equal value to the similarities and differences in their experiences. This supports his broader argument for an expanded understanding of plural photographies and the cultural and historical situatedness of those photographies. Ultimately however Wright looks at what photography is for those from Roviana and he explores this through the words of local people.
Faletau Leve is one of the many locals Wright spent time with during his years in Roviana, between 1998 and 2001. It is a quote from Faletau that provides the title of the book and his portrait by Wright is on the front cover. Narratives concerning Faletau form the basis of the prologue, chapter 4 and epilogue of the book and these stories and their particularities are central to the way Wright organizes his insights to Roviana lives in photography. Faletau’s worn, photocopied image of the raid on Roviana by the HMS Royalist in 1891 provides Wright with an event and its photographic trace with which to demonstrate his point about the contingency of history. Wright examines modes of photographic expression, often through connection with an individual and unfolds historical and social narratives from these encounters; the studio stael (studio style) imagery generated at An Tuk’s Honiara store, the advent of “love photos,” photographs as memory-objects, a precious photo taken in 1953 that expands into a narrative of American involvement in the Solomon Islands during World War II.
Wright is sensitive to the visual dynamics of a photograph but also clearly communicates the tenderness and loss a mother, Voli Gasimata, feels when she looks at the photographs of and by her absent daughter Clarinda. The differences and similarities in Donald Maepio’s and Josephine Wheatley’s family photograph albums each map the ownership and history of such collections in Roviana but are also revealing about reciprocity, kinship and changing value systems. Wright’s introduction to so many local voices personalizes and particularizes the content of the images and creates continuities across social and historical fields. Multiple voices are heard which underscore Wright’s subscription to the plurality and mobility of Pacific histories. Wright’s note that Faletau’s construction of Roviana events from his own perspective is an act of visual decolonization is a convincing closing argument.
This is a careful, sensitive ethnography that contains compelling portraits of people of Roviana for whom I hope the book is an important contribution. Oddly for a book about photography the quality of the images is not the focus and with over 80 images some unevenness is to be expected given the diversity of sources, but it is Wright’s field photographs that are among the weakest. This is a small quibble however in the context of a book that very successfully argues for photographs as a means of allowing for and understanding that a single uncontested history is impossible and, like Faletau’s battered briefcase, can contain the possibility of multiple histories.
Andrea Low
The University of Auckland, Auckland, New Zealand
pp. 379-381