Early Photography in Samoa

Abstract

Abstract The history of photography in Samoa, a small group of islands in the Western Pacific, suggests, in microcosm, the history of ‘exotic’ photography throughout the world in the period of imperial expansion. The romantic myths of the South Seas, coupled with the islands' practical significance to their colonizers as coaling stations, navy bases and a source of raw materials and cheap labour, encouraged outside interest and assured a market for the products of many kinds of photographers. As early as the 1880s, amateurs on holiday, scientists in the field, and itinerant professionals had passed through Samoa, taking a wide variety of images away with them. By the 1890s, Apia, Samoa's largest town, was home to three resident photographers. Their work was put to conventional private use there for portraits, wedding pictures and the like, and was widely distributed overseas as novelty carter-de-visite, cabinet-size, and full-plate albumen prints, as souvenir postcards and gravures, and as half-tone illustrations in newspapers and magazines. In addition to documenting a society undergoing great change, early photographs of Samoa are often strikingly beautiful, appealing to our appreciation of the exotic and romantic, much as they were intended to do for their foreign audiences one hundred years ago.