Making the visual record of New Guinea: William G. Lawes’s photographic encounters

ABSTRACT

Missionary relationships with local populations following annexation of Pacific places by imperial powers involved intense interactions with potential and actual converts. Reverend William G. Lawes of the London Missionary Society and other New Guinea missionaries supplied photographs from the field to anthropologists and to the secular press. How such images were created in situ demands detailed study. This article examines embodied encounters involving the camera between Lawes and Papuans of the Port Moresby mission district and ambiguous materializations of such encounters in the physical mediums of glass plates and paper. Investigating photographic equipment and materials, place and climate, and their impact in early photographic encounters reveals the complexity of such meetings of European/missionary, Papuans, and camera technology in which Indigenous populations frequently shaped the visual conception of their land and their persons.

KEYWORDS:

• Photography
• New Guinea
• missions
• colonial encounters
• Indigenous agency

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The exact number of Islander men and women who served in New Guinea is still unknown. As an indication of numbers, by 1888 some 201 Pacific Islanders (including teachers’ wives) had been brought to New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands (Moore and Mullins 2012, 123, note 279).

2 The invention of the wet collodion process is credited to Archer; however, several others were responsible for the discovery of collodion as a photographic agent (Gernsheim 1988, 11–14).

3 Identifying the full extent of Lawes’s photographic oeuvre is complicated, due to ongoing doubt as to which of the 281 images marketed by Henry King’s Sydney photographic studio were in fact made by Lawes. There are also many likely Lawes photographs in archives around the world that are not attributed to him—the result of the often haphazard collecting and cataloguing of photographs in museum and other collections in the past. A large component of my engagement with Lawes’s photographs has therefore consisted of identification of his work in archives visited in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and Switzerland. The result of this detective work is an extensive database of Lawes’s photographs (Lübcke 2016, vol. 2, Appendix 2).

4 D’Albertis (1880) was an Italian naturalist-adventurer who travelled to Northwest and southeast New Guinea on several occasions between 1872 and 1878, including three excursions up the Fly River.