Pacific album

Abstract

Photography has played a crucial role within cultural processes which constitute the lived histories of Fiji Indian diasporas. Within Fiji such relationships are exemplified in the practices of Indianowned photographic studios in the 1950s and 1960s, although domestic photography continues to be the major form of vernacular cultural expression within contemporary Fiji Indian (or Indo-Fijian) communities now scattered throughout Australasia, the USA, Canada, and the Pacific region.1 Remarkably, this highly visual process of inscription takes place against the historical context of apparent invisibility of the Indian community within photographic practices of the colonial period in Fiji, although Indians were introduced into the colony as indentured labourers in 1879 and have lived there in considerable numbers since.2 Over the last decade, important theoretical work has emerged on the once overlooked practices and discourses of family photography,3 as have a number of postcolonial studies into the vernacular photographic practices of Afro-Caribbean and Asian diaspora communities in the West.4 Important research which maps the cultural implications of Indian street or vernacular photography has also emerged recently.5 However, there remains a need for work which focuses on vernacular or family photography in relation to specific diaspora experiences within colonized spaces such as Fiji, as well as the postcolonial spaces of the Indian ‘double diaspora’.6