Colonial Photography and Exhibitions: Representations of the Native and the Making of European Identities

By comparing images produced in Britain and France with those produced in North America, Australia, New Zealand, the Pacific, China, and Japan, Anne Maxwell illustrates how colonial photography was used to further different social and political agendas.

She argues that while some photographs were directed at naturalizing the precept of colonialism, others were used to criticize it and to empower indigenous subjects. Written from a postcolonial perspective this interdisciplinary book will be of interest to scholars, students, and researchers.

Dr Maxwell is a senior lecturer at Melbourne University. But her research for this volume stretches far beyond Australia's troubled Aboriginal issue. She looks at how exotic images from the lenses of Victorian photographers stylised and romanticised colonial races. The process included the Hawaiians, the American Indians, the New Zealand Maori, Philipinos and much of Polynesia and Micronesia. She spares us none of the cruelty perpetrated in the name of such questionable progress. Her descriptions of how "primitives" were dragged off to suffer the London winter in grass skirts -- for the amusement of smug Victorian exhibition-gawpers -- make heart-breaking reading. Even the king of Hawaii was exhibited as a curiosity in an American circus!

The photographs, gleaned from museum archives all over the world, are this book's greatest strength. Even the most clinical academic must feel the mute woe in the eyes of the "noble savages" whose tragedy has been frozen, black-and-white, in time.

A must-have for any serious student of Post-Colonial study and for photography buffs.