Exposing New Guinea: The early photographers, W. G. Lawes and J. W. Lindt
This thesis explores the early photographic representation of southeast New Guinea through a close examination of the lives and work of two of the first Europeans to fix the region and its inhabitants on glass plate negatives. It has been acknowledged that the London Missionary Society missionary William G. Lawes and the professional photographer John W. Lindt created images of New Guinea that have become iconic through their repeated reproduction in print media, their global dispersal, and replication by subsequent visitors-with-cameras to the region. However, the immediate circumstances of their photographs’ production have received little attention in the literature. Focussing on the nature of Lawes’s and Lindt’s photographic encounters, traces of which can be read from the images themselves as well as their writings, reveals the significance of the camera as well as the agency of Papuans in shaping the photographic record. The contemporary framings of their New Guinea images are also considered in order to understand fully the different trajectories for the promotion and influence of their photographs, which are now equally widely dispersed in archive collections around the world. In the chapters that follow I reconstitute the histories of Lawes’s and Lindt’s New Guinea photographs in order to better understand their production and circulation. The result of this investigation is a more nuanced visual history that encompasses the specific encounters, networks, technology, and texts that shaped the early photographic record of New Guinea.
Pacific photography, colonial history, history of photography, photography, missions, mission history, New Guinea, W. G. Lawes, J. W. Lindt
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