Fijian man carrying breadfruit

A young man carrying bread-fruit on a pole

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This extract originally appeared in New Zealand Photography Collected: 175 Years of Photography in Aotearoa (Te Papa Press, 2025).

The New Zealander Thomas Andrew lived in Apia, Sāmoa, from 1891, where he operated as a photographer, trader and plantation owner. Many overseas visitors came to Sāmoa in the decades around 1900, as it was a refuelling stop on the shipping route from Australia to the United States, as well as a trading centre and a tourist destination. Sāmoa had long resided in the European imagination as an ideal of the exotic South Seas, and tourists snapped up Andrew’s photographs of scenery and Pacific peoples as souvenirs of their visit. He also sold his photographs directly to museums around the world as ethnographic images.