Chris Wright

Material and Memory: photography in the western Solomon Islands

Despite frequently making use of photographs in their fieldwork and research, anthropologists rarely take account of their materiality. The identity of photography as a medium and its phenomenological status is, from the outset, assumed as given. There is no concern for what photography actually is in different cultural contexts. Recognizing photographs as material culture is a way to address this blind spot, and suggests that any methodological use of them requires a more complex and subtle approach.

The third subject: Perspectives on visual anthropology

Alors que le terme danthropologie visuelle est utilise couramment, le sens de la combinaison des deux termes anthropologie et visuelle est rarement precise clairement. Lanthropologie et le visuel peuvent etre articules de manieres et par des processus divers. Inspire par les tentatives recentes de redefinir lanthropologie visuelle comme sous-discipline, lA. explore un certain nombre de ces possibilites. Sont abordes les points suivants : place et role de lanthropologie visuelle comme sous-discipline a partir dun commentaire de louvrage de M. Banks et H. Morphy Rethinking Visual Anthropology, la polarite complementaire ou opposee de laspect anthropologique et de laspect esthetique, le developpement de nouvelles technologies et la relation avec les pratiques ethnographiques, la question du style et du mode de representation et du lien entre image et texte, les relations avec dautres disciplines, notamment avec les disciplines artistiques, les nouveaux programmes denseignement danthropologie visuelle dans les universites anglaises.

The echo of things : the lives of photographs in the Solomon Islands

The Echo of Things is a compelling ethnographic study of what photography means to the people of Roviana Lagoon in the western Solomon Islands. Christopher Wright examines the contemporary uses of photography and expectations of the medium in Roviana, as well as peoples reactions to photographs made by colonial powers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Roviana people, photographs are unique objects; they are not reproducible, as they are in Euro-American understandings of the medium. Their status as singular objects contributes to their ability to channel ancestral power, and that ability is a key to understanding the links between photography, memory, and history in Roviana. Filled with the voices of Roviana people, The Echo of Things is both a nuanced study of the lives of photographs in a particular cultural setting and a provocative inquiry into our own understandings of photography.

“A Devil's Engine”: Photography and Spirits in the Western Solomon Islands

This article looks at photographic practices in Roviana Lagoon in the western Solomon Islands of the South Pacific. It argues that the efficacy or affective power of photographs in this context must be understood in terms of what is locally called maqomaqo (soul or shadow). Photographs contain a material trace of the essence of what they portray, which enables them to “touch” their viewers. This case study allows us to think about the innate metaphysic of photography, and about the way in which “photography” only ever exists as a series of local photographies, which emerge from the interplay between this innate metaphysic of the photographic technology and local ontologies.