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Overview
This studio portrait depicts two Samoan women identified as Tualele (on left) and Selesa (on right). They are leaning on their elbows on a fibre surface that is possibly an 'ie fuipani (black shaggy garment). Both have lei (necklaces), 'ula lei (whaletooth necklaces) and upper garments with leaves around the collar and shoulders.
New Zealand Photographers in the Pacific
The South Seas, as they were often known before the 20th century, have long held a place in the imagination as an exotic, carefree paradise where the restrictions of Western society no longer applied. Such a construction has been encouraged by the makers of visual images. These include photographers like Alfred Burton of Dunedin’s Burton Brothers studio in 1884, as well as residents such as Thomas Andrew, a New Zealander who settled in Samoa’s main centre Apia in 1891 as a trader and photographer.
Destination Samoa
Samoa was much visited in the decades around 1900. It was on the shipping route as a refuelling spot from Australia to the United States, a tourist destination, a trading centre, and a political hot spot in the tensions between Germany, the United States, and Britain over colonial control. There was money to be made selling take-home images of the Pacific by the two resident photographers Andrew and John Davis (and later A J Tattersall, when he took over from Davis around 1893).
Packaging the exotic Pacific
Visitors purchased pre-packaged and coded images that could serve as recognisable evidence that they had experienced the Pacific. Women were usually pictured topless, and the idea of Polynesian beauty represented in highly stereotyped ways. Davis, for example, said that of the hundreds of young Samoan men and women who presented themselves at his studio hoping to be immortalised in photographs for book illustrations or tourist images, he would chose only two or three as having the sensual features the market expected. Tourist demand for signifiers of the exotic could also be satisfied by posing subjects in indigenous costume. In this example, the women wear 'ula lei (whale-tooth necklaces). Such 'exotic Pacific' images were progressively collected by museums for their ethnographic value.
Thomas Andrew
Relatively little is known about Thomas Andrew, or his sitters. His work is diverse, ranging from scenic images and records of political turbulence in Samoa, through to portraits and nude ‘artistic studies’. Commentators have often claimed that Andrew’s work is more sympathetic towards his subjects and less exploitative than other colonial photographers in the Pacific, but close comparison across such photography is needed to substantiate this view.