Portrait of a young Samoan woman

The South Seas, as they were often known before the twentieth century, have long held a place in the imagination — as an exotic, carefree paradise in which the restrictions of Western society no longer apply. Such a construction has only been encouraged and reinforced 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, as a trader and photographer in 1891.

Samoa was a busy, much-visited place in the decades around 1900. It was on the shipping route as a refuelling stop between Australia and 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 in the sale of 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).

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, related 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 could choose only two or three as having the sensual features the market expected.) Tourist demand for the exotic could also be satisfied by subjects in ceremonial costume and such images were collected in turn by museums for their ethnographic value.

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’. Some of his portraits were probably commissioned by the sitters, but most were clearly produced for commercial distribution.

Athol McCredie

This essay appears in Art at Te Papa (Te Papa Press, 2009)