READING PHOTOGRAPHS IN COLONIAL HISTORY: A CASE STUDY FROM FIJI, 1872

Authors

Brigitte d’Ozouville

Abstract

This essay explores the significance of a photographic triptych, ca. 1872, pasted on a colonial-era photographic album about Fiji. The author argues that these photographs are reliable documents of referent questions that go beyond the aesthetic effect of photography, the new impact of the medium, and the European curiosity developed for the representation of the “savage.” First, the content of these images are examined within the context of the Fijian colonial history, that is, their “signifiant” in Barthes’s terms. But the interpretation of this triptych is extended further in light of our present knowledge of photography and its use in a certain class of photographers’ hands in the nineteenth century. Consequently, the second part of this essay is an attempt of interpretation, paying attention to the local commercial photographer Francis Herbert Dufty. The “signifié” of the photographic images as a triptych is stressed and the photographs are re-placed in the historical era of their production and circulation. In conclusion, the triptych is considered as a metaphor for the benefits of civilization and Westernization by means of evangelization at a time when Fiji, already partly converted to Methodism, would become a new colony of the British Empire.

Recommended Citation

d’Ozouville, Brigitte (1997) "READING PHOTOGRAPHS IN COLONIAL HISTORY: A CASE STUDY FROM FIJI, 1872," Pacific Studies Journal: Vol. 20: No. 4, Article 7.
Available at: https://digitalcollections.byuh.edu/pacific-studies-journal/vol20/iss4/7